A sales company for Africa

In 1959, KSB founded a sales company in South Africa. The production of pump sets soon followed.

When KSB founded its own sales company in Johannesburg in 1959, South Africa was about to enter a period of transformation. In 1960, the country began to detach itself from the British colonial power. The Prime Minister, Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, called a referendum in January to change the state into a republic, with a South African president replacing Queen Elizabeth II as the head of state. 

The referendum was successful and the new Republic of South Africa was proclaimed on 31 May 1961. The date was declared a national holiday. The previous governor general Charles Robberts Swart was elected as the first president. However, this did not mean that the country was united. The Apartheid policy, which involved systematic racial segregation and placed the non-white population at the lower end of the social hierarchy, would remain a problem in South Africa for many years to come. Nevertheless, the country on the Cape of Good Hope was rich in raw materials, and with its soil and climate, KSB saw that it had high development potential if the political leadership governed it well. KSB’s assessment was right on this point.

Despite its social divisions, South Africa made good economic progress in the following decades. KSB responded to this trend by building its own production facility in Germiston near Johannesburg at the end of the 1960s. Prior to this, the employees had built complete pump sets from imported components in rented premises.

Today, KSB operates its only production facility on the African continent in South Africa. However, a number of sales companies and service companies have since been established in Egypt, Algeria, Angola, Kenya, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria and Zambia.