Pretoria: While growth prospects in the developed world are meagre at best, big business turns its attention to developing regions such as southern Africa for its next growth frontier. Multinational corporations, unlike governments, do not see political boundaries when they consider a region, they regard the growth of consumer populations, the development of economies, the discovery of raw materials, the availability of labour and – of relevance to this survey – the ease with which products and services can be moved into, out of and within that region. This ‘business mobility’ stretches further than the physical rail lines and highways between countries; it includes the openness of governments to collaborate with one another and with the private sector; the removal of regulatory and operational barriers in cross-border trade; the availability of logistics services that penetrate the entire region, not just one country; and, critically, the availability of appropriately skilled people who are the lifeblood of a vibrant logistics sector.
20 June 2013