Hino On Top

Hino South Africa has recently come out top in two important national surveys conducted this year.

Hino was, once again, the only truck manufacturer to collect a Platinum Award at the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) Dealer Satisfaction Index (DSI) awards presentation in Johannesburg. This was the sixth consecutive year that Hino has collected a Platinum award.

This was the 30^th year that NADA has conducted its Dealer Satisfaction Index survey, which is independently researched by Lightstone and provides an objective measure of the business relationship between the brand and its dealers in the retail sector. Manufacturers were assessed by their dealers across three key areas, dealer friendly (20%), investor friendly (40%) and customer friendly (40%).

The initial DSI survey, in 1996, was conducted among seven manufacturers and this year 36 brands were in contention, and attracted 1 610 dealer responses, with 181 of them being in the truck and bus category, which equated to 80% of these dealers in South Africa.

“We are delighted that Hino has not only collected a Platinum Award in NADA’s DSI survey, but the fact that it was for the sixth successive year shows consistency in our dealings with the dealer network,” said Anton Falck, Vice President of Hino SA.

“We sincerely believe that Staff satisfaction and Dealer satisfaction are important drivers towards Customer satisfaction and the continued success of our business and brand in South Africa. We thank our dealers for confirming that we are on the right track and continue to Kaizen the areas that can be improved.”

In addition, Hino SA not only came out top in the combined score but also topped all three categories – Sales, Service and Parts – for the second quarter of 2026 in the quarterly Datatrack survey, which measures transport operators’ satisfaction with 14 truck brands sold in South Africa.

Hino headed the combined scoring with a total of 99.23, with the second-placed company on 97.62. This was the 13^th consecutive quarter, since Q1 in 2023, where Hino has held top position on combined score. In Q2 of 2026 Hino also topped the sales category with a score of 99.32, the Service category with 99.80 and Parts with 98.56.

“We are proud to have achieved even better than our target of 95 in each of the categories, which underlines the ongoing support we provide to our customers in line with Hino’s international strategy of Total Support, which is built on strong working relationships with all in the value chain,” explained Falck.

This return to top spot in the Parts category came after a couple of quarters where Hino was not the leader due to a temporary setback with logistics as a strategic decision saw our replacement parts being supplied from Hino Motors in Japan whereas they previously came through Hino Motors Europe, based in Belgium.

“This allowed us to strengthen our logistics capabilities, while identifying critical stock requirements and increasing our stock holding by an additional month to support long-term supply stability,” explained Anton Falck. “These actions have placed us in a stronger position to achieve our target allocation fill rate of 96%.”