Grand Lakes Veículos, an Angolan subsidiary of Adone Holding and Volkswagen do Brasil dealership in Angola, has just won the “Outstanding Innovation – High-Performance Program” award, granted annually by the automotive company to importers in Latin America and Africa. “We know that there is a lot of work to be done, but this award has a special meaning. It shows that we are on the right track, increasingly contributing to improving the transport system in Angola, both in the countryside and the urban areas”, points out Geraldo Kulaif, director of Grand Lakes.
Headquartered in Luanda, the company belongs to Adone Holding. It has been operating in the heavy vehicle segment on the African continent since 2007, with a dealership in the capital, Luanda, and a branch in Catumbela, in the Benguela province. Next June, two more branches will be opened – one in the province of Cabinda and the other in the province of Huila. The company is an official dealership of the Volkswagen Caminhões e Ônibus brand, among other brands related to the heavy-vehicles segment.
In Luanda, it also has an Auto Parts store in the Patriota neighborhood, where the best-selling items are filters, valves, brakes, clutches, and bearings, among other automotive products. J“Our expansion is part of the plan to generate more and more jobs in Angola, based on excellence in customer service”, explains the director of Grand Lakes. In addition to buses and trucks, the units offer customers the convenience of buying original VW parts and accessories. More than 8,600 items can be purchased in person or through a delivery service throughout Angola.
Grand Lakes has been working, since 2019, in partnership with the local government and technology and mobility specialists in the Regular Urban Passenger Transport Project (TURP), whose goal is to identify and define the main operational routes and to select urban and interprovincial bus stops, enabling the daily transport of thousands of people. “Our main strategic goal with these terminals is to offer not only quality in the transport system but also safety and improvement to the quality of the lives of a population that needs it so much”, emphasizes Kulaif.
Since March 2022, the company has also participated in the Integrated Program for the Development of Rural Commerce (PIDCR), led by the Angolan federal government. The goal is to improve the distribution of goods from the countryside to consumption areas and boost the growth of the rural sector. “This program has the potential to generate more than 5,000 indirect jobs”, says Kulaif. The 200 vehicles provided by Grand Lakes are subsidized by local authorities to rural producers and distributed throughout the country.
Along with those projects, for the past 17 years, garbage collection in Angola has been carried out with trucks purchased from Grand Lakes, which also provides technical assistance to the government to operate the service.
Also awarded by Volkswagen’s High-Performance Program were Euromotors (Peru) and Hansa (Bolivia) in the After Sales category. In Innovation, another winner was Cemcol (Honduras). Diesa (Paraguay) and Porsche (Chile) took first place in Sustainability, while Avelino Abreu, Julio Cesar Lestido and Porsche Colombia shared the victory in the Marketing category.