BEIJING -- China's home appliance makers are invigorating Africa via bringing, instead of purely products in the past, investment, employment, and technologies to one of the world's most populous continents.
For instance, Hisense's South Africa home appliance industrial park, funded by Hisense Group, a renowned Chinese home appliance firm which owns three famous brands, namely Hisense, Kelon and Ronshen and China-Africa Development Fund, has created jobs for nearly 3,000 local citizens.
--From made in China to made in Africa
Apart from exporting products to Africa, Chinese companies are pouring more efforts into business localization to bring more benefits to Africa.
Take Hisense Group as an example, it entered the market of South Africa in 1994 and will continue to boost its business via adding investment to expand its factories inAfrica if demand growth reaches certain requirement.
Its South Africa home appliance industrial park, its largest one of the kind in the southern part of Africa and already being operational since June 2013, produces 450,000 refrigerators and 600,000 televisions annually.
In the park sitting in the Atlantis industrial area, an important electronics production base 40 kilometers away from Cape Town, South Africa, European energy consumption and environmental protection standards are adopted in production to regulate the market by Hisense Group.
Besides, the Chinese home appliance producer also introduces high-end home appliance products popular in the Europe and the U.S. to expedite local technology development.
Hisense hoped to take root in South Africa, its head of South Africa branch once told media. Factories there generally use new technologies and equipment and produce new products currently.
Via localized production and operation, Hisense is changing its "made-in-China" products into products "made in Africa" and is more and more accepted by African consumers.
--More Chinese firms interested in going to Africa
Similar to Hisense, many Chinese home appliance producers are showing great interest in expanding their business to Africa.
Now, some large Chinese home appliance makers gaining increasing market share in Africa gave a positive demonstration to their Chinese peers. In June, Hisense owned as high as 26 percent share in television sales market of South Africa, beating competing goods for five months since February and even exceeding the total of the shares of the second and third largest market share holders.
Compared with the African-market exploration by individual businesses, Chinese companies engaged in the entire home appliance industrial chain have been encouraged to go out as a group in some Chinese cities with complete industrial chains.
For example, merchants from Zhongshan, a coastal city with complete home appliance chains located in south China's Guangdong Province, rushed to sign cooperation pacts with African trade companies last year.
Analysts say that Chinese companies' going out as a group is good for them to be involved thoroughly and more deeply in international production capacity cooperation and to benefit more African people.
(By Duan Jing, duanjing@xinhua.org)
A single purchase
