Mombasa Heat!

Mombasa is the second largest city in Kenya and the home of the main port in East Africa, as it is situated on the Indian Ocean. See the map to the left to get your bearings on where the main cities are. Due to its trading history, the city bears influences from Portuguese, Arab (mostly Omani, Yemeni, and Saudi), Indian, English, Somali, and Kenyan cultures. See the map to the right to understand historical trade routes :) Super interesting!!

Map of Kenya--take note of distances and major cities

Historical trade routes from East Africa to the Indian Ocean

We trekked into the industrial sector of Mombasa, taking note of the different Chinese businesses listed.  Two of them were open and we interviewed the managers.

1. Hightime Trading Limited assembles and sells  TianMa and SanLG motorbikes. They were very helpful in providing information and gave us the names of a few other motorbike firms we had not heard of yet. It seems as though the motorbike assembly industry is a huge market the Chinese are entering, perhaps due to its low cost of entry and low technical needs.

2. Foshan Trading Co., Ltd. is an independent Chinese furniture company. They were eager to provide their opinion of Chinese industry across Kenya generally, but were extremely closed-mouthed about their own enterprise. This is the first furniture assembly company we are aware of in Kenya but unfortunately got little traction on their actual activities.

We then stopped by for a visit at the Kenya Port Authority. The port itself is a restricted area that we could not enter, but we were able to snag a meeting with the Kenya Maritime Authority (KMA). The KMA regulates all port activities and keeps data about port activities. Unfortunately, they have never sorted information about the port of origin for shipments, so they were less than helpful for us. It does amaze me that a port would not keep track of where their imports come from but only where exports are sent to.

They did send us to a shipping company nearby that does keep track of such data and the representative we spoke with said he would see what he could pull up. We are still waiting to hear back from them, but are not keeping our fingers crossed on it.

Overall, we had an okay work-trip to Mombasa. We are going to look more into shipping companies with offices in Kenya, because we had not really explored that industry before. Overall, it seems that the more we uncover, the more there is. Though we know that that revelation is not uncommon for research, it remains quite exciting to go through it first-hand.

Thanks for reading! We have several meetings set up for next week in Nairobi and are hoping to interview at least 20-30 more companies in the next three weeks!