Billion’s In Private Sector Investments

Dube TradeZone 2 will serve as the foundation of Dube TradePort’s next phase of investment attraction. Covering 45 hectares of prime light industrial land, it is projected to create 260 construction and 4,265 permanent jobs and is expected to attract R18 billion in private sector investment over a five-year period said Erskine.

Trade Zone 2’s locational challenges are formidable. With a work programme that will run for the next 15 months, the project will see the movement of some four million cubic meters of earth for the platforming of the site.

“When you try and build a 50-hectare platform on what was previously growing sugarcane, it's an extremely large engineering project,” says Erskine, who took up his role in September 2016 after two years as acting CEO.

“You have to essentially create 50 hectares of level land in an extremely unlevel environment, so there's an enormous amount of work going on at the moment.”

Planned since the late ‘90s and implemented since the mid-2000s, the project is seen by Erskine as a major economic catalyst for the region.

The cumulative employment opportunities created by Dube TradePort – when calculating the downstream and upstream value chain linkages – now totals 13,000 indirect jobs, added to the economy of KwaZulu-Natal.

“We are here largely as an economic development project. Our primary objective is investment and jobs and new sector development. This is really what we are all about.”

Samsung is one big name in the Phase One segment – now almost fully booked and operational. Understandably at this stage, Erskine is playing the Phase Two name game close to his chest

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