Out of the 11 local companies which showed an interest to supply 387 vehicles, only seven of them submitted their financial and technical offers to the Public Procurement & Property Disposal Service (PPPDS).
The preliminary technical evaluation opening of these companies was held on April 25, 2018, on the premises of the PPPDS. The PPPDS floated the tender a month and a half ago on behalf of the Ministry of Finance & Economic Cooperation (MoFEC). The vehicles are tended to be distributed to governmental organisations.
Yangfan Motors, Hagbes, AGTA and Marathon Motors are the four companies which bought the bidding document, but did not submit their offers due to the shorter tender floating time and stringent requirements, according to some of the companies Fortune spoke to.
Ries Engineering, Belay Ab Motors, Ultimate Motors, Abay Technic & Trading, Nyala Motors, Alta and Motor Engineering Company of Ethiopia (MOENCO) are the contenders who submitted their offers in accordance to the Terms of Reference (ToR) prepared by the Federal Transport Authority.
The vehicles will be supplied in three lots, 68 automobiles, 241 double cabinet pickups, and 78 minibusses. Except for MOENCO and Belay Ab Motors, which vied for the three lots, the remaining companies bid on one or two lots.
MOENCO pledged to offer Toyota brand vehicles for all three lots while Belay Ab offered Baic, JAC and Donteng brands for automobiles, double cabinet pickups, and minibusses, respectively. Ries Engineering, Ultimate Motors, and Alta are vying to supply only double cabinet pickups agreeing to provide Ford, Mahindra Scorpio, and Baic brands respectively. Abay Technic and Nyala Motors contended for the supplying of Foton pickups and Nissan minibusses.
The bid, restricted to only companies with a local presence, aimed to save foreign currency and encourage local assemblers, according to Assefa Solomon, deputy communication officer at the Service. The Service has procured close to thousands of vehicles since its establishment in 2010.
The number of companies which assemble vehicles locally has increased drastically since 1998. So far the Ethiopian Investment Commission (EIC) has licensed 31 foreign and 73 domestic vehicle assembly investments. Yet only 18 of them became operational with a production capacity of assembling 6,000 units a year.
A month and a half ago the government awarded Belay Ab Motors a contract to supply 400 Dongfeng Motor Corporation (DFM) branded vehicles for the price of 352 million Br.
Eshetie Berhan (PhD), lecturer for nearly two decades at the Addis Abeba Institute of Technology (AAIT), school of mechanical and industrial engineering, appreciates the move in encouraging the local assemblers.
“But these assemblers should scale up themselves into manufacturers eventually,” said Eshetie. “At least by producing some parts,” he adds.
The government must assist them and devise enforcing policies that will push the industry to turn to manufacturing, according to Eshetie.
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