The National Automotive Design and Development Council (NADDC) says it will move the Nigeria auto industry from Semi- Knocked Down (SKD) to Completely- Knocked Down (CKD) production capacity in the foreseeable future.
This is contained in a statement by the Director-General, NADDC, Mr Joseph Osanipin.
Osanipin said this during a familiarisation visit to NORD Motors, Proforce, Mikano Motors, CIG and Simba Group local auto assembly plants in Lagos.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that SKD refers to a manufacturing and trade practice where a product is partially assembled before being exported to another country.
The recipient country then performs the final assembly of these components to produce the finished product.
CKD is similar to SKD, but it goes a step further. In CKD, the product is shipped in a completely disassembled state.
The components are usually packed in separate units, and the recipient country must perform the full assembly of the product.
According to Osanipin the facilities have enough capacity in terms of installed capacity and level of operation even beyond the perception of the public.
”At NADDC, our ambition is to increase the local components of every vehicle that is coming out from the assembly plants. “Basically our intention is to move from SKD to CKD in the next three to four years.
“The essence of this tour is to establish where we are, what is our reality, where are we in moving from SKD to CKD?
“And from what we have seen, we have seen what we need to do, those we need to talk to, and the kind of synergy we need to have with other stakeholders to move ahead.”
The director-general said to achieve CKD production capacity in the auto industry, the country needed to do backward integration and engage with the components manufacturers.
He said this was critical because it was a complete ecosystem and no one could do it alone.
He applauded the readiness of the assembly plants to embrace Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) production.
In their various responses the managing directors of the companies commended the NADDC boss’s efforts in propelling the local automotive industry.
They said with proper regulations and consistent enabling environment, the auto manufacturers could achieve CKD in no distant time.(NAN
