Entrepreneur Aspires To Curb Furniture Imports
Lesedi Mkhutshwa | Monday March 13, 2017 18:00
Ndaba is a director of Berlina Industries factory, located in the light industries, and its furniture shop, which operates at the Francistown Local Enterprise Authority (LEA) incubators Units.
In an interview with Business Monitor, Ndaba said that their business deals with fabricating of office, school, and domestic wooden and steel furniture, kitchen fittings, ceiling decorations to only mention but a few.
He further said that his company also does upholstery, fabrication, welding, partitions, repairing of photocopy machines, faxes and others. “Our vision is to be the best manufacturing furniture company in Botswana, which will be competent to distribute variety of quality products and services,” he said.
Ndaba further said that he started his business after realising that most of the furniture used in both central and local Government is imported from countries such as China and South Africa.
He indicated that it was high time Batswana used their own creativity and localise the manufacturing of different products, which can be supplied to the citizens so that more income can be generated to the country.
He described his furniture creations as of high quality and lasting for a longer period of time than others. “The government could be saving money by allowing local companies to manufacture furnisher for different purposes.
We can also do maintenance of office furnisher for different company which is more effective and less costly than imported goods,” she said.
The entrepreneur also said that furniture business is flocked with foreign furnisher shops such as Lewis, FurnMart, Supreme Furnitures, OK Furnitures and Chinese furniture shops. He said that they often lose more customers to their competitors because Batswana do not believe in local talents.
“It is difficult to convince Batswana to purchase in local furnishers. They don’t support nor believe in our innovative goods,” he said.
He said that even though there is no market in the furniture business they have managed to attract dozens of customers because of their continued relations and commitment of serving goods that their customers wants and prefer.
He added that they reach their customers through different media platform such as advertising through the Botswana advertiser and social media applications such as Facebook.
He said that Berlina Industries was established in 2014 and boosted by the Economic Diversification Drive (EDD).
He noted that before the inception of EDD, the business was underperforming but it is currently doing well.
Ndaba stated that he used some of his savings to start Berlin Industries and used to inject part of his monthly salary to sustain the business until it started flourishing.
He revealed that his company has hired six permanent employees and four individuals paid on commission.
The businessman said that he has experience as he once worked as an instructor of carpentry at Madiba Brigade Centre in Mahalapye.