Luxury car maker BMW has threatened to close its Rosslyn plant near Pretoria because of power failures that have cost it hundreds of thousands of rand in lost production, Beeld newspaper reported on Friday.
The outages are caused by the theft of power cables, the newspaper said.
BMW spokesperson Johan van der Walt told Beeld that BMW’s umbrella company in Germany was concerned about the production losses. Each breakdown cost the company around R200 000.
If BMW pulled out, so would many of its suppliers, Van der Walt said. Such a move would also lead to the loss of at least 10 000 jobs, Beeld said.
BMW in Germany decided where each new model should be built and the perceived unreliability of the South African operation would count against it in the production of new cars in future.
Tshwane municipal spokesperson Helen Schoonwinkel said the well-organised cable thieves disrupted power in the municipal area at least twice a week.
BMW had been directly affected four times in the past six weeks and twice each in 2000 and 2001.
Thieves had stolen 18,5km of cable in the city in the past three months. The cable fetches around R10 a kilogram on the black market and each kilometre weighed around 730kg.
The Rosslyn plant produces cars for BMW markets in the United States Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Australia and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. BMW recently spent R300-million upgrading the plant to ease production bottlenecks. – Sapa