Getting the container out is the easy half

Corridor works with manufacturers and agri-processors on the part that comes after the ship leaves — the paperwork the buyer's bank will actually accept, and the money to carry the order until it pays. Gqeberha and Johannesburg.

How we work

What we actually do

A manufacturer in Struandale wins an order for 400 pallets into Ghana and then finds out the buyer wants ninety days, the bank wants security the company does not have, and the forwarder wants a certificate of origin nobody in the building has ever filled in. That gap is the whole of our work.

We sit on your side of the table. We read the contract before you sign it, we check what the buyer is actually good for, we build the document set the buyer's bank will pay against, and we find the facility that carries the order from raw material to settlement.

We are not a bank, we are not a freight forwarder, and we do not take a share of anyone's business. We charge a monthly retainer and a success fee on money that lands in your account.

Nineteen years of it

Corridor started in 2007 as two desks above a panel shop in North End, doing customs classification for three automotive suppliers who kept getting stopped at Ngqura.

Since then we have taken 214 exporters through a first shipment and arranged R2.1 billion in pre-shipment and post-shipment facilities, most of it through two commercial banks and one development finance institution. Roughly sixty per cent of the work is still automotive components and agri-processing out of the Eastern Cape. The rest runs north up the corridors — Botswana, Zambia, the Copperbelt — and along the West African coast, which is where the growth has been since 2022.

We have never taken an equity stake in a client and we are not going to start.

A permanent desk in Abidjan

From March 2026 we keep a permanent desk in Abidjan, the first time we have put anyone on the ground outside South Africa. It covers Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Senegal and Nigeria, and it exists because too much of that work was being done over email at the wrong hours of the day.

Zanele Dhlomo

Director, West Africa

Nine minutes on a shipment that went wrong

A 2024 consignment of citrus concentrate to Rotterdam that sat at Ngqura for eleven days over one wrong tariff code. Recorded with the client's permission; the buyer is not named.

214

Exporters taken through a first shipment since 2007

31

Destination markets we have documented into

11

People, split between Newton Park and Illovo

R2.1bn

Trade facilities arranged, none of it our own money

2026 in four quarters

Q1 · January to March. Thirty-four consignments documented, R318 million drawn against pre-shipment facilities, twenty-two days average from bill of lading to payment. One new market opened — Senegal, two furniture exporters out of Dimbaza.
Q2 · April to June. Forty-one consignments, R402 million drawn, twenty days average to payment. The Abidjan desk opened in March and carried nine of the quarter's shipments. Two claims went to ECIC cover and both paid inside sixty days.
Q3 · July to September. Twenty-nine consignments — the quiet quarter, and the citrus ran three weeks late. R261 million drawn, twenty-six days average to payment. That is our worst figure of the year and all of it was congestion at Durban.
Q4 · October to December, forecast. Fifty-two consignments already on the book, R470 million committed. We expect the average to come back under twenty-two days once the Durban backlog clears, and we will publish the actual figure in February.