Smartphone vendor Samsung Electronics will open its manufacturing plant in South Africa.
Recently, software vendor Microsoft, which recently took over the device business of Nokia in a $7.2 billion deal, announced job cut to eliminate around 18,000 resources – primarily targeting streamlining the smartphone production.
The Samsung facility will be at the Dube TradePort, a duty-free area adjacent to the harbor in the eastern city of Durban. It’s one of several special economic zones the country is setting up to encourage investment.
Samsung officials said it would make an announcement shortly. It is not known whether the plan would be utilized for making devices or televisions or both.
“We have worked with Samsung and they identified the Dube TradePort as a space to operate from,” said Trade and Industry Director-General Lionel October.
President Jacob Zuma will launch the special economic zone within a month or so and the first investment anchor will be Samsung.
Bloomberg report said the South Korean company is targeting $10 billion of sales in Africa annually by 2015. The number of mobile-phone users may rise 43 percent to 346 million by 2017 from 2012 in sub-Saharan Africa, the fastest-growing region, where roughly two-thirds of the population are without a mobile subscription, said GSM Association in 2013.
