AISI turns 20 with R381m in output and 1 236 jobs as Tau backs wider mandate
The Aerospace Industry Support Initiative has grown from a R300 000 pilot into a R50 million a year programme, and government now wants it to reach marine and advanced manufacturing.
Twenty years ago South Africa chose to stop being only a buyer of imported defence and aerospace technology and to build the capability to research, design and manufacture it at home. Trade, Industry and Competition Minister Parks Tau told an audience at Waterkloof on Monday that the choice is paying off, and put numbers to it.
The Aerospace Industry Support Initiative, known as AISI, started with an annual budget of roughly R300 000. It now runs at close to R50 million a year, with co-investment from the firms it backs. Over the past decade it has supported 142 small and medium enterprises, helped create and sustain more than 1 236 jobs, enabled 148 new technologies and products, and helped firms secure 49 international certifications and standards.
Those interventions generated approximately R381 million in local industrial output and more than R332 million in direct exports.
The minister was speaking at the twentieth anniversary of the programme and ahead of the Africa Aerospace and Defence exhibition, AAD 2026, which brings more than 300 exhibitors and over 50 official delegations to Waterkloof alongside global primes including Airbus, Embraer, Leonardo and Saab.
The firms behind the figures
Tau named the companies the programme has carried. Jonker Sailplanes, supported through flutter analysis and ground vibration testing for European certification, now exports its JS5 sailplane to Europe with export revenue above R30 million and is commissioning new production facilities this year. LambdaG has developed a space-qualified Global Navigation Satellite Systems antenna for low-earth-orbit satellites. Kutleng Dynamic Electronic Systems has built a flight-certifiable avionics platform now being integrated into a South African Air Force programme. AutonoSky designed, developed and manufactured the A22 Manqoba unmanned aerial vehicle for military applications in South Africa, reducing reliance on imported systems.
The minister also named the country’s New Space cluster, Simera Sense, NewSpace Systems and Dragonfly Aerospace, as having put South African-built satellite technology into orbit.
On the regulatory side, Tau said he appointed the members of the South African Council for Space Affairs at the end of last year, to keep the environment conducive for the responsible and peaceful use of space, and recognised council members in the room.
AISI does not work alone. Tau pointed to longer-standing instruments, the Technology and Human Resources for Industry Programme and the Support Programme for Industrial Innovation, which continue to link researchers, universities and industry and feed the innovation pipeline.
Defence exports at a record, and the Denel question
The minister tied the programme’s future to defence sovereignty. South Africa’s defence exports reached a record R10,1 billion in 2025. Munitions alone, led by Rheinmetall Denel Munition, accounted for R4,8 billion, close to half of that. Earlier this year RDM committed a further multi-billion-rand investment over the next three years, on top of roughly R1 billion it already spends annually upgrading its four South African plants, to double capacity in response to global demand.
Tau said RDM exists because Denel, the state-owned aerospace and defence company, brought decades of sovereign engineering capability into a joint venture that could compete for and win contracts at that scale. He said government remains committed to Denel’s continued stabilisation as a strategic platform for this kind of partnership.
He did not claim the road is clear. Manufacturers still carry high energy costs, constrained access to capital, logistics constraints and skills shortages, and he said government’s task is to keep removing that weight so companies can compete on the strength of what they build.
Where the next twenty years go
The minister said the CSIR is considering a broadened mandate for AISI, extending its reach across the marine and wider advanced manufacturing sectors it already touches, and that government intends to keep backing the model of patient, targeted, partnership-based industrial support.
The recent Defence Industry Lekgotla reaffirmed preserving sovereign industrial capability, advancing dual-use technologies, and retaining and upskilling critical technical skills. Tau described Armscor’s acquisition and localisation requirements as one of government’s most powerful levers, on the argument that every defence contract specifying local content and local skills development builds capability in a way no grant or subsidy can replicate on its own. Government will keep exploring how programmes with a national footprint, Special Economic Zones among them, can anchor these technologies into advanced manufacturing clusters and corridors.
On transformation, Tau said AISI requires the firms it funds to hold at least Level 4 B-BBEE status and is deliberately building a pipeline of black industrialists, innovators and technology entrepreneurs able to compete in local and global markets. He named capital intensity, certification requirements and decades of concentrated ownership as the barriers that have kept aerospace and defence largely closed to black entrepreneurs and emerging enterprises, and said AISI’s transformation mandate is a measure of whether the industrial strategy is succeeding rather than an add-on to it.
He committed government to deeper collaboration already under way with the Industrial Development Corporation, the Export Credit Insurance Corporation, Armscor, Denel and major original equipment manufacturers on co-investment, enterprise supplier development and industrial scaling.
The technologies he expects to define the next chapter are artificial autonomous systems, advanced materials, additive manufacturing, space technologies, digital engineering and unmanned aerial vehicle technologies. His closing instruction to the sector was to use the AAD 2026 platform to form partnerships and secure investment, and to match the past twenty years of ambition with scale.
Source: South African Government (www.gov.za), Minister Parks Tau: 20 years of the aerospace industry support initiative and Africa aerospace and defence 2026, https://www.gov.za/news/speeches/minister-parks-tau-20-years-aerospace-industry-support-initiative-and-africa
