
Staff are the moral fibre of any dealership
When the moral fibre of your staff is in the right place, you are on the road to success, no matter what kind of business you are in.
- Dealer News
- 10 July 2025
SOMI '25 (State of the Motor Industry) served as an ideal stage for Toyota SA Motors’ President and CEO, Andrew Kirby, to present an insightful overview of the motor industry's current landscape from the perspective of South Africa's leading automotive brand.
In the keynote address entitled “The Year that was”, Andrew highlighted the challenges facing the South African motor industry and the importance of growing sales to over the 600 000 threshold to provide the scale needed to attract more foreign direct investment.
He also stressed the need for government support. The SA government’s newly announced policy on incentivisation for the production of BEVs (Battery Electric Vehicles) is a step in the right direction, but it is not yet enough to secure the future of the automotive production base in South Africa. This problem is exacerbated by the slow creep of de-industrialisation as well as a concomitant drop in local content, which is now below the 40% mark for locally produced vehicles.
An interesting perspective presented by panellist Mikel Mabasa, CEO of naamsa, was that even though we have challenges, as a country our political environment is unusually stable as seen in the recent elections and the subsequent relatively incident-free transition to a GNU (Government of National Unity). In Mikel’s words, we can look forward to a ‘year of abundance’.
Andrew was not quite so upbeat when he made his sales forecast of 535 000 (a 3.7% increase on the actual sales for 2024) and he jokingly remarked that he should perhaps put a ‘more positive spin on the numbers’, which indicates that he is quietly optimistic that the much-hoped-for upswing kicks in sooner and more dramatically than anticipated. Of course, as he pointed out, this all hinges on the continuation of the interest-rate-cutting cycle, and further fuel price stabilisation.
Andrew also eloquently extracted five key trends emerging in the automotive sector:
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In the wake of the devastating floods in the Eastern Cape, Mercedes-Benz SA has partnered with Gift of the Givers to deliver urgent aid to flood-affected communities in Butterworth and Mthatha.