Leading with firmness, fairness, accountability and the ability to introspect is what turns the wheels of success for Riaz Haffejee, chief executive of Sumitomo Rubber SA, a firm growing across the continent.
Haffejee, 46, who has worked for more than 20 years in the automotive and telecommunications sector, initially joined Apollo Tyres as chief operating officer in 2012 before taking on the role of chief executive in 2013, after Japanese-owned tyre manufacturer Sumitomo Rubber bought the company.
Durban based Haffejee recently won the national Minara Chamber of Commerce, Business Person of the Year Award in acknowledgement of his achievements.
Haffejee is a member of the exco of the Durban Automotive Cluster, he sits on the exco of the Durban Young Presidents’ Organisation and is a certified leadership coach.
Haffejee is also a former chairman of the South African Tyre Manufacturers Conference. He obtained a BSc degree in mechanical engineering in 1994 and an MBA in 2004 from the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
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But it has been a long road, working his way up from the bottom as a manager in a factory paint shop, to the top job of chief executive.
“I joined Ford, which was then the SA Motor Corporation, in 1995 in the north of Pretoria straight out of university. I was in the paint shop in production, managing a team of 20 people. I had no idea what I was doing and I had to learn on the job,” Haffejee said.
After a year he moved to BMW as a quality engineer, also in the paint shop.
“I moved around a lot. I felt like after five years of production I needed to do something else, so I made the transition to sales and marketing and became an after-sales quality engineer,” Haffejee said.
“It wasn’t dealing with customer care, there was a big call centre that handled that. I managed all the customer research programmes. I redesigned the service book. I quite enjoyed it and had a lot of fun,” he said.
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Haffejee then moved to BMW’s KZN corporate sales division, before taking a head office post that led to his promotion to general manager of government sales and customer relationship management.
After 13 years with BMW, Haffejee felt he had reached a plateau and needed a fresh challenge, so he jumped at an opportunity to join Vodacom as an executive.
“It was a big change. Internally it was very competitive. It is a challenging, complex environment, the technology is complex, the commercials are complex. I really enjoyed it,” Haffejee said.
But the allure of his first passion pulled him back to the automotive manufacturing industry when he was offered a position as chief operations officer (COO) with Apollo Tyres in 2012.
“It was a bit more of a complex role because there was a factory and a sales organisation in Zimbabwe and two factories in SA, in Durban in Sydney Road, and in Ladysmith. They were also exporting to South America and had an office in Brazil that they had just set up,” Haffejee said.
He was COO for just three months when former chief executive Luis Ceneviz moved to a role abroad, and Haffejee took his place.
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“In that same year we started to plan the transaction with Sumitomo and by December 2013 the transaction happened,” Haffejee said.
He credits the success of the firm to a long line of effective former executives, including Ceneviz and Michael Hankinson, now chairman of The Spar Group and Grindrod, and the company has also credited Ceneviz for rejuvenating local manufacturing.
The company embarked on a R2.1 billion production expansion and development project in 2014 in Ladysmith which will see an additional 400 jobs created over a five-year period. Haffejee heads up the company’s local team of almost 1 400 staff, around 1 000 of them working in the firm’s Ladysmith factory. He describes his leadership style as “firm and fair” in an environment where introspection, accountability and effective communication between workers and managers are key to success.
“Mike was a chief executive here for about seven or eight years and he was the first guy to really change the culture of the company, and I have built on that. We have spent a lot of time and effort with leadership and have put all the top 50 people in the company through a really strong senior leadership development programme which we made especially for our company,” he said.
Haffejee believes in empowering staff to understand their personal purpose so that this can be matched with the firm’s purpose to ensure motivated and engaged staff. His qualification as a leadership coach has informed his approach to life and management.
“Everyone has voices that tell you things about certain situations. If you find yourself in a situation where you know it is going to push you, you will find a way of moving out of that situation if you don’t have the right frame of mind. You will feel better and justified in avoiding something if you feel subconsciously that is not what you want to do, and sometimes that’s not good for people.
“Introspection that comes from knowing and understanding is quite powerful,” Haffejee said.
Dunlop expansion driving ahead
The second phase of Sumitomo Rubber’s R2.1 billion upgrade and expansion of its Dunlop tyre manufacturing plant in Ladysmith is in full swing and is expected to be completed in 2018/19.
The company has also expanded its footprint locally and on the continent by developing hundreds of retail franchises and entrepreneurial roadside container businesses over the years.
Sumitomo Rubber SA (SRSA) chief executive Riaz Haffejee said the company expected to complete the Ladysmith expansion by the middle of next year, growing the existing staff complement by around 400 jobs to 1 200.
He said the investment had been initiated partly on the back of the R6.1bn expansion of Toyota’s Prospecton factory for the production of the new Hilux and Fortuner.
The initial phase, which began in 2014, focused on the upgrading and modernisation of the plant’s capacity, introducing new technology and equipment aimed at increasing manufacturing output of high quality passenger and Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV) tyres.
Phase two, at an estimated value of R910m, is focusing on the manufacturing of truck and bus tyres for commercial use.
The Department of Trade and Industry provided a grant of about R300m under the Automotive Investment Scheme programme.
The company is also exporting widely throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, riding on its Dunlop brand, which is entrenched on the continent.
“We have more than doubled the product range that we make in Ladysmith in the last three years. We primarily export to 43 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and the BSNL (Botswana, Swaziland, Namibia and Lesotho) countries,” he said.
“It’s very competitive and dominated by cheap imports, but Dunlop is a very strong brand name in Africa.”
Capitalising on this brand power SRSA competes fiercely with other imports, mainly from China, on the continent.
“Because of the amount of export business we do in Africa, our biggest push is to establish own-branded retail outlets.
“We have 116 formalised Dunlop Zone dealers, a mid-tier franchise called Dunlop Express, and then we have our container concept which is moving informal traders into formal trade,” Haffejee said.