Mitc identifies 5 South Africa firms to distribute local products
By Chimwemwe Mangazi:
In a quest to increase Malawi’s exports to South Africa, the Malawi Investment and Trade Centre (Mitc) has identified five South African based distributors that will be importing and selling Malawian products.
The five are; Kalaizi Pty, Surplus Grain Traders, Setsong Summer Trading, Polaris Group and Giants Canning CC.
The identification of the five firms comes at a time Malawi exported goods and services worth $195.2 million in 2017, according to Trade Map.
It also follows a trade mission to that country that Mitc and representatives of some local companies embarked on recently.
Mitc Public Relations Manager, Deliby Chimbalu, said the Centre believes that there is a huge potential for Malawian products in South Africa as some of the distributors in that country have already been importing and stocking products from Malawi.
“We had very fruitful meetings in South Africa with some reputable distributors who have shown interest to stock Malawian products such as natural honey, white haricot beans, kidney beans, sugar, hibiscus and other herbal products.
“These distributors expressed interest to have Malawian products due the superior quality of the products. However, most of them expressed concern that our local companies need to be consistent in terms of supply and also that they should improve on packaging and labeling since most Malawian products are organic and if well indicated on the packaging it could attract a lot of consumers,” Chimbalu said.
Four companies from Malawi went on the mission including, the Agriculture Development and Marketing Corporation (Admarc), Mango Investments, Global Trade Limited and Classic Business Concepts.
The mission was taken under the Enhanced Integrated Framework (EIF) project whose goal is to promote sales of Malawian value-added products by local non-traditional exporters.
