Bottled water, a lucrative market in South Sudan
By Isaiah Abraham
Oct 25, 2006 — Besides accommodation, the bottled water industry seems to be one of the industries making an aggressive and loud splash to capture the imagination of the S. Sudanese consumer.
Both services have been widely successful because they fulfilled a specific consumer need. In the case of accommodation, S. Sudanese love to put up in clean and smart places, but for decades, if they were lucky they would find housing services provided by the Government of Southern Sudan (GOSS) on cheaper prices over exorbitant foreign accommodation facilities. Most of the time, they never bothered asking their fledgling Government to help them out of this crisis.
They therefore learnt to shut up, but when push comes to shove, they will start asking. This city population in the next two years or so would swell up to a million from its current estimated 500,000 people.
Similarly, the bottled water industry found a consumer base that had been thirst from clean and safe water from the Nile in centuries. In 1990 when one of the northern Sudan companies in Omdurman started bottling water from White Nile, this was seen a major innovation though few businesses ventured to engage in taking this product. Now it has started a trend where S. Sudanese would longer trust their tap water (if any) and – though the revenue in this sector have not been made public. Statistic shows that over 50% of Juba residence use bottled water. It’s a rare and expensive commodity in town that someone would rather spare some dinars for it- a multibillion potentially multibillion dinars industry.
In the accommodation sector, just like the bottled water industry, the fight for the consumer is a gruesome battle that consumes hundreds of millions dinars if not dollars in market budgets. A tent rent accommodation soared upto $150 a day!
In a field where a functional use of a product- quenching thirst- is similar, foreign or national bottled water industry (mainly from the North) has only one choice of making an impression in the eyes of the consumer: branding
In a country like ours that has no classified Bureau of Standard everything could go awkward. Branding as part of this market tool is becoming unobserved in the battleground among industry top tier players. Though there is a believe that water is water and there is no nutritious ones, there is like hood that somehow spoilers could use water to disseminate our people. If the said body could have been there, it would have established regulatory measures where it would publish list of products that are consistently meet its stringent production specifications. This equally could be applied to all other commodities that stuffed the city market.
While the top bottled water brands in Juba now may not have the intention of going to the trouble of producing a technically sound product or show the public the exact merit of its product, they are offering real competition with pricing as the main weapon. Small players with low overheads and products of indifferent quality now dominate the lower end of the market, especially the urban slums. This is where battled gets dirty because water-just like other soft drinks-makes money on volumes. With the consumer spoilt for choice, there is little that the big players can do to extract huge margins from the lower end of the market.
Thus, the stakes in the bottled water business are huge and the brand that manages to win market share will command billions of dinars in revenues in the coming years. Globally the consumption of the bottled water has been growing so fast such that the category is expected to take the second place in size after soft drinks in the total beverage market.
Competition in the bottled water category has never been stiffer-thanks to little knowledge from the public. Researchers say this while industry the pioneer brands were selling their water with less marketing efforts, the higher number of new water consumers and entrants today in Juba is amazing!
Therefore, it is in this paper that GOSS should take every opportunity that avails itself to taps more taxes and encourage its own corporations (if there be) to take the lead of producing our own bottled water along the River Nile other than wait for external industries to siphon out billions of dinars in this market.
The author is based Southern Sudan. He could be reached at [email protected]