Category: Manufacturing

New data confirming that China's manufacturing sector is slowly coming back to life helped to give a badly needed boost to African commodity and currency prices on Tuesday.  China's Purchasing Managers Index, a key metric that measures factory activity, jumped to ...

In August 2019 Melange Coffee Roasters, a family-owned Ethiopian coffee processing company inaugurated a new plant in Addis Ababa. With an investment of 1.37 million USD, the plant immediately began exporting processed, powdered packages of Ethiopia’s world-renowned coffee to China and South Africa. ...

With a majority of China's ports and factories still offline due to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, African businesses are starting to run very low on supplies of products sourced in China, prompting discussions about where they will be able to find new, reliable yet equally affordable suppliers. ...

Coming off the N4 motorway near the small town of Marikana in South Africa’s platinum landscape, one almost immediately encounters the huge Tharisa Minerals mining operation. This gigantic open cast mine was started in 2009 for the production of chromium concentrate and platinum group metals (PGM) and ...

African policymakers up and down the continent will all tell you that one issue, more than any other, stands apart as the key priority in 2020: electricity. Without additional electric power capacity, both generation and distribution, none of their ambitious industrialization plans will be possible. Industries need ...

Ethiopia stands out from other African countries for its ability to attract Chinese companies to open factories there. Through a combination of tax incentives, industrial parks, and its strategic location, Ethiopia is outpacing pretty much every other African country in luring ...

In his regular column in World Politics Review, the always-interesting author/journalist Howard W. French wrote today about Africa and its booming population will become a transformative power in the future. But contrary to growing enthusiasm among many observers that African countries will be able to industrialize in ...

The pace of Chinese manufacturing going offshore has picked up significantly in the past year, spurred on by U.S. sanctions and the worsening U.S.-China trade conflict. Regardless of what's going on with the U.S., manufacturers were already motivated by China's rising ...

Last week's launch of the new Mara Phones was widely celebrated across the continent as the company touted them to be Africa's first 'entirely home-made' smartphones. "The ...

In a new working paper published on the China-Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, prominent China-Africa professor Tang Xiaoyang from Tsinghua University in Beijing highlights the role of Chinese investments into the Ethiopian leather sector and offers key insights into the main ...

China’s growing economic muscle in Africa frequently raises fears of domination. However, on the ground, these companies often create jobs and try to comply with laws aimed at strengthening local stakeholdership. A case in point is the Sinoma Cement Company, a Chinese company set up in Zambia ...

Author Irene Yuan Sun argues in her now book that Africa is poised to become the world's next manufacturing boosted by Chinese investment and production expertise. With costs steadily rising in the PRC, more and more companies are looking to offshore production ...