Johannesburg - Owners of spaza shops have a lot to learn from their foreign counterparts.
Across the platinum belt and the City of Gold spazas are increasingly being run by foreigners who have displaced local businesses.
They operate longer hours and keep a wider variety of goods compared to their counterparts in Vosloorus, Soweto and Rustenburg.
Rashid Ahmed, a small business analyst at Finmark Trust, says the foreign-owned businesses are booming partly because of their longer operating hours.
"They can afford to work incredibly long hours because in most cases they have left their families in their own countries," says Ahmed.
He says another contributor to their success is that they organise themselves into associations that focus on growing their businesses and saving by buying in bulk. In contrast, local operators are unlikely to be members of an organised group.
Some foreign shopkeepers even sleep in the storerooms of the shops they run, like Jalaloddin Mohammad in Orlando East, Soweto.
"This shop is to me what women and beer are to other men," says Mohammad, who has been working at the store for two-and-a-half years.
Mohammad says he only leaves the shop for a maximum of two days a week.
He has neither family nor friends in the country. He came into the country through the Bangladeshi owner of the shop, who runs a chain of similar shops.
Our investigations in the East Rand, Soweto and Rustenburg indicates that many of the foreign nationals running the shops are employed by groups of elusive and powerful foreign owners who typically have several stores.
Information about the owners was scarce and requests for it ended many interviews. The employees feared that their bosses would abandon them if they discovered that they had spoken to the press.
These owners club together to buy goods from retailers at favourable rates but they do not pass the savings they get from this practice onto their customers. On average they charge more than their local counterparts but remain in business because they stock a wider variety of goods.
This practice is drawing a mixed response from their customers.
Mzoli Matiwane of Vosloorus says he prefers spending his money at a store run by foreigners because he is guaranteed to find whatever product he is looking for.
Elizabeth Ntlatseng of Orlando East does not mind to shop around because of the higher prices.
"In most cases the prices at foreign-run spazas fluctuate," says Ntlatseng, adding that she only shops at these spazas for items she can't find at the spazas of locals.
A number of the foreign stores we visited may be operating below the radar of the law. Many employees did not have their identification documents with them.
Home affairs spokesperson Cleo Mosana said the department did not have statistics on the number of businesses operated by immigrants, including those who are in the country illegally.
The SA Revenue Service (Sars) has an idea of the numbers of foreign-owned small businesses that operate in the country legally but does not record it for tax purposes.
"When a person registers a business we ask for their nationality but we don't record that information for tax collection purposes. Many of these businesses are exempted from tax because they generate profits of less than R100 000 a year," says Sars spokesperson Adrian Lackay.
What is clear though is that there is an increasing number of foreign small business owners chasing the African dream on our southern shores.
Difficult trading
"I am surprised to see that foreign entrepreneurs have even managed to penetrate into the most remote parts of the rural communities," says Ahmed.
Difficult trading conditions have forced many local entrepreneurs to rent their premises to foreign business people. One such entrepreneur is Dumisame Nkosi of Vosloorus on the East Rand.
"I didn't rent it out to a local entrepreneur because Bangladeshis have a good reputation for paying their rent on time while South Africans generally come up with excuses when it's time to pay rent," he says.
"Besides, I can charge them (Bangladeshis) whatever I want," he says.
Nkosi charges his tenant R2 500 a month.
The emergence of foreign-owned small businesses in Vosloorus has been a double-edged sword for Nkosi's business adventures.
He has had to close his transport company that used to deliver goods to other spaza owners in the township because the number of locally -owned spaza shop dwindled and the foreign nationals use the services of one of their own.
In Phokeng, outside Rustenburg, many shops there are run by Somalis and Chinese who were not forthcoming about their business activities. Not all of them operate legally.
Phokeng is home to the Royal Bafokeng Nation (RBN), which is said to be among the richest communities on the continent because of their mining wealth.
RBN spokesperson Martin Bekker says they have worked with the police over the past two years to root out illegal businesses in the area. He says random inspections have resulted in the closing of businesses that failed to produce their business licences last year and in 2008.
"We are currently contesting four court applications for eviction of such persons at the Mmabatho High Court," he says.
He says locals are responsible for the surging number of foreign entrepreneurs.
"The problem seems to lie with Bafokeng who obtain trading licences and then unlawfully sell or transfer these to foreign nationals in under-the-counter deals," he says.
The battle for survival is likely to intensify this year in the townships and rural areas as job losses force families to choose more carefully where they spend their money.
- City Press
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