Reviving foundries is not nostalgia: It is a national competitiveness strategy

By Engineer Martin January and Engineer Paul Matshona

Foundries are often dismissed as relics of a bygone industrial era; smoky, inefficient remnants of an economy that Zimbabwe supposedly outgrew.
This perception has quietly shaped policy neglect, underinvestment, and institutional indifference toward one of the most strategically important sectors in any industrial economy.
It is a dangerous misconception. Modern foundries are not museums of heavy industry.
They are technologically advanced, energy-intensive, and environmentally regulated production hubs that underpin competitive manufacturing systems worldwide. From infrastructure development and mechanised agriculture to mining efficiency, rail rehabilitation, and energy systems, foundries sit at the core of industrial capability.

An economy that cannot cast its own metal components is not industrialising; it is assembling growth on borrowed parts. Zimbabwe’s industrial revival will not be delivered by rhetoric about beneficiation alone. It will be built in the unglamorous but decisive space of metal casting, fabrication, and component manufacturing.

The Invisible Backbone Zimbabwe Has Allowed to Collapse

Every industrial process begins with metal shaped to purpose. Crushers require liners.
Pumps require casings. Tractors require engine blocks and gear housings. Railways require couplings and brake components. Power stations require valves, turbines, and structural fittings. All of these originate in foundries.
Countries that industrialised successfully did not leave this sector to chance. China produces more than half of the world’s cast metal output. India produces over 120 million tonnes of castings annually, supporting automotive, mining, rail, and agricultural industries. Even advanced economies such as Germany, Japan, and the United States maintain strong domestic foundry bases because outsourcing core industrial inputs weakens competitiveness and economic sovereignty.
Zimbabwe once understood this. The collapse of ZISCO and the broader engineering ecosystem did not merely remove steel production; it dismantled downstream foundries, fabrication workshops, and metallurgical skills pipelines.
The result is a manufacturing sector that imports what it should be producing and exports what it should be transforming. Today, Zimbabwe’s foundry industry consists of an estimated thirty to forty small and medium enterprises, with a combined installed capacity of around 50,000 tonnes per year. Yet effective utilisation is below thirty per centum, not because of lack of demand, but because of structural constraints, energy instability, policy incoherence, and weak industrial linkages.

Import Dependence: A Silent Drain on Competitiveness
The cost of this neglect is visible in the trade data.
In 2024 alone, Zimbabwe imported iron and steel products worth approximately US$256 million. These imports include basic cast components used in mining, construction, agriculture, transport, and energy; items that could be produced locally if domestic foundries were supported.
This import dependence creates three vulnerabilities. First is foreign currency leakage. Every dollar spent importing a crusher liner or pump housing is a dollar not invested in domestic production capacity. Second is supply-chain fragility. Delayed components translate directly into lost output, idle capital, and missed revenue. Third is operational rigidity. Imported components are designed for generic conditions, whereas local foundries can tailor designs to Zimbabwe’s abrasive ores, unstable power supply, and maintenance realities, improving lifecycle performance and reducing downtime.

The Tax Regime for Foundry Inputs: A Hidden Competitiveness Penalty

Beyond energy and scrap availability, Zimbabwe’s tax regime imposes a structural penalty on foundry competitiveness. Key inputs; refractories, ferro-alloys, resins, binders, fluxes, consumables, and spare parts; are routinely subject to import duties, VAT, and cascading charges, despite the absence of local substitutes. In effect, Zimbabwe taxes domestic value addition while allowing imported finished cast products to enter the market at competitive prices. This reverses the logic of industrial policy. Instead of protecting production and taxing consumption, the system penalises transformation. International practice is clear: countries serious about manufacturing zero-rate or rebate taxes on industrial inputs. Zimbabwe’s current approach treats foundries as revenue sources rather than productive assets.

Mining Without Foundries Is Shallow Growth

Mining remains Zimbabwe’s economic anchor, contributing over 70% of export earnings in some years. Yet its contribution to industrial development remains shallow. Too many mines operate as enclaves, extracting ore, exporting concentrates, and importing most consumables. A single medium-sized mine consumes thousands of tonnes of cast components over its operating life: mill liners, grinding media, crusher wear parts, pump casings, rail tracks, and structural supports.

Supplying even a fraction of this demand locally would sustain multiple foundries, create skilled employment, and deepen mining’s domestic economic footprint. Recent steel developments illustrate what is possible. In the first eight months of 2025, steel exports reportedly increased by over 1,400% by volume, driven largely by new production from Dinson Iron and Steel. Yet these gains will remain narrow if downstream foundries are not deliberately integrated into mining and infrastructure supply chains. Mining without manufacturing creates growth without depth.

Scrap Metal: Exporting the Raw Material of Industrialisation

Perhaps the clearest example of policy incoherence is scrap metal. Scrap steel is the primary raw material for electric arc furnaces and small-to-medium foundries.

Zimbabwe generates over 300,000 tonnes of scrap annually through industrial activity, vehicle retirement, and infrastructure renewal. Yet tens of thousands of tonnes are exported each year, often informally, while local foundries struggle to secure feedstock. This is economically perverse. Scrap exported raw is scrap that cannot be transformed locally into cast components, only for Zimbabwe to re-import finished products at several times the value.

Scrap Export Controls: The South African Contrast Zimbabwe Cannot Ignore

South Africa treats scrap as a strategic industrial input, not a tradable waste product. Export controls and price-preference mechanisms protect domestic foundries and mini-mills from feedstock scarcity. The objective is industrial stabilisation, not blanket protectionism. Zimbabwe has taken the opposite path. Scrap continues to be exported; ironically to South Africa; driving up domestic scrap prices and forcing local foundries to compete against buyers operating under a protected regime. This represents policy-induced cost inflation. Zimbabwe effectively subsidises regional competitors while eroding its own manufacturing base.

Energy Policy: The Single Greatest Constraint

If neglect weakened foundries, energy instability is what is killing them. Foundries are energy-intensive by nature. Melting metal requires continuous, predictable power. Zimbabwe’s electricity system; characterised by load-shedding, voltage fluctuations, and uncertainty; is incompatible with metallurgical operations. Interrupted melting cycles damage furnaces, waste raw materials, and escalate costs. Many foundries have shut down not because they lacked markets or skills, but because they could not survive energy unpredictability. Other economies designate foundries as strategic industrial users, offering guaranteed supply windows, time-of-use tariffs, and embedded generation options. Without similar measures, foundry revival will remain aspirational.

Duty-Free Equipment Policies: Why Good Intentions Are Backfiring

Zimbabwe’s duty-free policy on foundry and manufacturing equipment was intended to stimulate industrial investment. In practice, it has lowered entry barriers for imports far more than for local producers. Local foundries face the full burden of energy, scrap, taxes, and finance while competing against imported castings produced under scale economies, protected scrap regimes, and subsidised energy. In isolation, duty-free policies have compressed domestic margins rather than expanded domestic capacity. This is asymmetric liberalisation: opening markets before consolidating production.

Jobs That Matter: Skills, Not Just Numbers

Foundries do not create mass employment on the scale of retail or informal trade. They create high-skill, high-productivity jobs, pattern makers, metallurgists, furnace operators, quality inspectors, and toolmakers. These skills anchor industrial ecosystems and support downstream manufacturing. At a time of de-industrialisation and youth unemployment, reviving foundries is about rebuilding productive capability, not chasing job counts detached from industrial depth.

Environmental Reality: Modern Foundries Are Part of the Transition

Environmental arguments are often used to sideline foundries. This is outdated. Modern foundries rely heavily on recycling-based production, making steel casting significantly less energy-intensive than primary smelting. Regulated domestic foundries can have lower lifecycle emissions than imported cast components produced under opaque conditions abroad.

Competitiveness Is Measured by Transformation

Zimbabwe’s competitiveness will not be measured by how much raw material it exports, but by how much it transforms locally. Export volumes without industrial depth create vulnerability, not resilience. Foundries are the bridge between resource endowment and industrial capability.

Supporting Small-Scale Foundries Without Sliding into Protectionism

Small and medium-scale foundries already exist. Their challenge is not inefficiency but exposure to a policy environment that treats them as fully mature multinationals. Smart, time-bound, rules-based support is required.
Targeted local market reservation for standardised, low risk cast products; manhole covers, agricultural implements, non-critical wear parts; can provide demand certainty while preserving competition.

Graduated procurement thresholds can ensure local supply where capacity exists without compromising quality or safety. Support must focus on lowering structural costs: reliable power, regulated scrap supply, shared testing laboratories, and common pattern-making facilities. Assistance must be conditional and performance-based, reviewed periodically, and withdrawn where firms fail to progress.

Conclusion: The Foundation We Cannot Afford to Ignore

Industrialisation does not begin with megaprojects. It begins with foundations. If Zimbabwe is serious about industrial revival, infrastructure development, mining competitiveness, and economic sovereignty, then foundries must move from the margins of policy debate to its centre.
This is not nostalgia. It is strategy. And without foundries, competitiveness will remain out of reach.