Unilever South Africa has commissioned a new Vaseline Petroleum Jelly production line at its Maydon Wharf factory in Durban, after a R100-million investment. The line lifts the site's share of global Vaseline Petroleum Jelly supply from about 60% to 80%. Unilever Southern Africa chief executive Stefan Cloete cut the ribbon on 2 October with KwaZulu-Natal Premier Thami Ntuli, eThekwini Mayor Cyril Xaba and Deputy Transport Minister Mkhuleko Hlengwa.

"This investment is a vote of confidence in South Africa's manufacturing future," Cloete said.

Maydon Wharf opened in 1912 and is one of Unilever's oldest factories anywhere. It produces around 140,000 tonnes of products a year across more than 20 production lines, including Vaseline, Lux, Lifebuoy and Sunlight. It employs about 350 full-time staff and 200 freelancers, according to Phahle Phalane, Unilever's head of supply chain for Southern Africa, and the installation involved 68 engineering and fabrication teams and more than 100 tonnes of steel cabling.

The decision fits a wider local strategy. Unilever South Africa makes 95% of what it sells here in its own six local factories, and last year raised the local content of those products to 80%, up from 40% in 2019. Managing director Justin Apsey told Engineering News in December 2025 that the shift was driven by business resilience rather than social pressure, after the pandemic exposed weak supply chains, but that going further would need large investments in local chemicals, plastics and fragrances.

Petroleum jelly is a refined crude oil product, and Unilever has not said where the base material for the Durban line comes from.

Moneyweb's Omeshnie Naidoo reported on the commissioning and the officials at the launch. HPC Mag MEA carried the production figures and the scale of the installation work. Engineering News reported Unilever's local content push in December 2025, including the gaps that remain in chemicals, plastics and fragrances.

R100 million is a modest sum for Unilever. What matters is the choice behind it. A multinational that can make Vaseline anywhere has decided to put four-fifths of the world's supply of its best-known product through one factory in Durban. That is a stronger signal about South African manufacturing than any investment pledge, because it is a bet on the plant's cost and reliability.

It’s the same pattern as locally built products winning abroad, and it sits against a harder backdrop: South Africa has lost half its refining capacity in a decade, and our vehicle component makers are losing ground to imports.

The other side of concentration is risk. If most of the world's Vaseline jelly now leaves through Durban, then the port, the power supply and the roads around Maydon Wharf matter to Unilever's global business, not only its local one.

You might also like our piece on South Africa's trade talks with Brazil, the push to protect biltong as an export, and Eskom ruling out electricity price cuts.

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