Roy Cokayne
A new plant for Hino trucks on Toyota South Africa Motors’s extensive manufacturing site in Prospecton near Durban was officially opened yesterday following an investment of R55 million in infrastructure facilities and equipment.
Johan van Zyl, Toyota SA’s president and chief executive, said yesterday that Toyota, as a group, was committed to the Hino brand and this investment underlined how serious it was about trucking.
Toyota SA realigned its truck business into a separate division under the Hino brand in April 2009. Hino Motors specialises in commercial vehicles and is a subsidiary of Toyota Motor of Japan.
Van Zyl said this latest investment was only part of recent spending by Toyota SA on local production, with more than R1 billion spent on production facilities in Prospecton over the past few years.
He said Hino was a strong brand with great global success and the South African truck segment was seen as a good growth opportunity, both in the domestic and export markets.
Hino dealers were showing confidence in the brand, Van Zyl said. “Since 2010 almost 50 percent of our Hino dealer network invested in new or revamped premises, with the total investment over this period running to well over R100m.”
Mary Willemse, a Toyota SA spokeswoman, said the annual production capacity of the truck plant had increased to 5 000 units on a single shift in the new assembly plant from 4 000 units in its old plant.
Willemse said new jobs had been created, with 160 people employed in the new plant. She was unable to quantify the growth in the workforce.
Van Zyl said the relocation of truck production to the new facility took place during production shutdown at the end of last year and enabled Toyota SA to implement a new assembly principle that allowed for sub-components to be assembled away from the main assembly line.
These assembled parts were delivered in sequence just in time to be fitted to the unit on line, resulting in productivity and quality benefits, he said.
Toyota SA assembles its Quantum buses and Ses’fikile minibus taxi vehicles on a separate production line in its Hino truck assembly area.
South Africa is a growth market for Hino, with sales of 1 126 trucks in the first four months of this year.