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Zimbabwe’s exports are growing rapidly and strongly, jumping just over 30 percent in the first five months of this year compared to January to May last year, with production and export of raw materials, mainly minerals and tobacco leading the way, but manufacturing is finally moving up the ladder.

This is needed as imports are also rising, but slower at around 18 percent. That still creates a trade deficit although one that is falling. 

But in these first five months we still bought US$689 million of goods and services than we, all together as a nation, sold. 

Our positive net inflows of foreign currency still rely on diaspora remittances, and on the net inflow of investment capital to make the books balance with a bit left over.

Exports from the mining sector still dominate what we sell and these are rising and will continue to rise. Higher prices for our assortment of metals we send out help, but more important is the rise in volumes and the beginning of ever more processing of minerals inside Zimbabwe. 

It makes far more sense to export minerals as bars of metal or as manufactured products than as semi-processed products. At least we are no longer exporting ores or rough cut blocks of granite and other unprocessed products of our mining.

Tobacco exports continue to rise, and should rise again, although less because of the poorer rains, over the next 12 months as the latest harvest is shipped out. 

But at the moment our exports of fully processed tobacco products are just 7,5 percent of the main tobacco exports. The tobacco contractors and buyers do some leaf processing before packing the containers, which adds value to leaf exports, but we are a long way from shipping a significant percentage of our tobacco harvest out as cigarettes, cigars and packets of pipe tobacco.

Even in other agricultural exports, the rise in cotton production and in processing hides is useful, but again we should be looking more and more at exporting fine textiles and shoes than cotton lint and processed hides. 

So like the mining sector, the agro-industrial sector needs to be looking at how to convert Zimbabwean raw materials to finished products. 

The rise in manufactured exports is important, but in many cases there are significant inputs of imported raw materials and imported components inside or packaging these exports. 

This is not wrong, since the manufacturers add value to the imported materials before they export. In fact a fair number now rely on their export retentions to fund their imports both for the export and at least some of their local markets, so we win.

But manufactured exports keep rising as we are now building regional markets as our business people get their marketing staff down to work and ride on the excellent relations that the Government has been building up to convert the good work their operations staff have been doing in creating decent products at competitive prices for local markets into exportable products. 

Filling Zimbabwean shelves means they have tested products they can sell to other people.

But fairly obviously we are missing the heavy industrial base that a manufacturing country needs to move forward faster and become a major exporter. 

We have a lot of raw materials and the expansion of mining investment and the expansion of agricultural production, driven by the investment-friendly climate and the serious efforts by the Government to help hard-working farmers grow more.

We have a manufacturing sector that can now produce a wide range of consumer goods with capacity utilisation in this sector now reaching the stage where several companies are expanding their capacity. 

What we tend to miss is the bit between the raw materials and the consumer products, our heavy or primary industry that makes the intermediate products. 

Even the producers of raw materials are reliant on quite a lot of valuable imports, such as steel products in mining and fertiliser in farming. There are exceptions, some large like the millers, but not enough.

This is not to say we are sitting back and doing nothing, and one factor we must take into account that while a consumer product factory can be set up fairly quickly and easily, it takes a lot longer on average for heavy industrial factories to be built. 

We can look at the ultimate heavy industry, steel, to see this. Tsingshan Holdings has been pushing its investment in Zimbabwe hard for three years and has reached the stage where its Disco blast furnace components are now at Manhize and its coke ovens are half finished at Hwange, but we are still looking at next year for steel production and a bit longer for the intermediate products like steel sheet, bars and the like that can both be exported and provide local manufacturers with what they need.

Cotton has gone through a number of problems, but the farming side is being fixed with Government intervention, but we still have problems on the manufacturing side with the largest industrialist apparently being starved of local lint. We need to sort this our fast.

Packaging and stationery products are shooting up the export scale, like doubling and tripling, yet we do not have paper mills, a glass works or can factory to provide the intermediate products these sectors rely on. Yes, they add a lot of value but a lot more would be added if we converted basic raw materials such as trees, cotton scrap, sand and iron to the intermediate products. 

Even a chemical industry that could convert a variety of basic materials to plastic pellets is needed, and the same industry is required for some fertiliser inputs.

So we need more investment into these primary manufacturers of intermediate products, the heavy industrial base in fact. We are getting this and getting there, but if any point of emphasis is needed this is the point. 

We must continue the pressure on expanding and raw material production, and on producing the finished products, but we also in private and public investment must be looking at the partially missing link between the two.