Kenya's concrete mixer imports, declared on both sides of the record

Kenya counted these machines rather than having them counted for it. Under HS 8705.40, concrete-mixer vehicles, Kenya's own import return records 66 units arriving from China in 2023 at a declared value of USD 2,019,953, and 121 units in 2024 at USD 5,962,422. Both rows carry a declared quantity and a declared net weight, with no estimation flag on any of those four measures — which is not true of every country in the same table. The net weights are 885,207 kg and 1,522,500 kg. Dividing gives 13,412 kg and 12,583 kg per machine, and USD 30,605 and USD 49,276 per machine. Declared value per machine rose 61 per cent in one year while the count nearly doubled. The record carries no explanation for that, and this page does not invent one.

The same return, all origins, same year: 161 units, CIF USD 8,187,191, net weight 1,975,374 kg, quantity and weight both declared rather than estimated. That is USD 50,852 and 12,269 kg per machine. China's 121 units are 75.2 per cent of the count, so three of every four machines Kenya recorded on this line in 2024 were declared Chinese in origin by Kenyan customs, not by a Chinese supplier. Subtracting the China row from the world row leaves 40 units, USD 2,224,769 and 452,874 kg from everywhere else, which is USD 55,619 and 11,322 kg each. One caveat belongs with that subtraction: the world figure is an aggregate across partners while the China figure is a reported line, so the residual is arithmetic on two rows of one return, not a number anybody filed.

China's declaration of the same shipments says something else. Reporting as the exporter, China records 86 units to Kenya in 2023 worth USD 3,507,957 and 108 units in 2024 worth USD 4,493,559. Against Kenya's own 66 and 121, and measuring both gaps against China's figure, the two authorities are 23.3 per cent apart on the 2023 count and 12.0 per cent apart on 2024, in opposite directions. On value the divergence is wider: Kenya's 2023 figure sits 42.4 per cent below China's, its 2024 figure 32.7 per cent above. Direction matters, because an import value normally includes freight and insurance and an export value does not, so the importing side should run 5 to 15 per cent higher. Kenya's world return does state its value on that freight-inclusive basis, and the China-partner rows on the same return are read the same way. The 2024 pair overshoots the band and the 2023 pair fails it in the wrong direction entirely.

Several mechanisms produce gaps of this shape and these records separate none of them: a shipment declared as an export in December clears as an import in January; national subheadings below six digits differ between countries; transhipment puts a third party on the paperwork. The useful conclusion is procedural. There is no single Kenyan figure for this heading, only a pair, and anybody quoting one without the other is quoting the half that suits the argument. Our 2024 destination map for this heading runs the same test across twelve reporting countries, and four of those pairs fail it outright. Kenya's is not one of the outright failures, and it is not a clean match either. That is the ordinary condition of customs data on this heading, and a page that shows only one side of it is not being simpler, it is being less useful.

Twelve countries filed a 2024 world-import row for this heading, and five of them counted nothing. Saudi Arabia's 1,499.751 units, Indonesia's 603.472, Algeria's 411.971, Nigeria's 285.93 and Thailand's 54.785 all carry the estimation flag, and their fractional form is the tell: no customs authority clears 603.472 machines. Those counts are arithmetic performed on a declared value, so a unit price derived from one simply returns the assumption that produced it. A third condition exists too: Kazakhstan, one of the same twelve, filed USD 16,480,762 against a quantity of zero — a missing measure, not a count of nothing. Kenya's 161 is none of these. It is smaller than four of the five estimates and it is the more useful number, because a league table sorted by unit count silently mixes machines that were counted with machines that were modelled. Our guide to reading customs data sets out the mechanism in full.

By unit count, most of the concrete mixing equipment China declares to Kenya is not on this heading at all. In 2024 China declared 1,500 units to Kenya under HS 8474.31, concrete or mortar mixers, worth USD 3,050,198 — an average of USD 2,033 and 843 kg each. The vehicle heading the same year averages USD 41,607 and 13,392 kg on China's declaration. One unit on the vehicle line is worth 20.5 times one unit on the mixer line and weighs 15.9 times as much. By value the comparison reverses: the 108 vehicles are USD 4,493,559 against USD 3,050,198 for the 1,500 mixers. Two entirely different machines share the phrase concrete mixer, both arrive in volume in the same country in the same year, and a quotation that does not say which of the two it is describing is answering a question nobody asked.

That cheaper line will not support a price band either. China's declarations to Kenya under it run 833 units at USD 3,955 each in 2019, 1,839 at USD 970 in 2021 and 1,500 at USD 2,033 in 2024: the average moves by a factor of four while the count moves by a factor of two. Weight moves with it — 1,518 kg per unit in 2019, 392 kg in 2021, 843 kg in 2024, against a full-sample median of 194 kg and a coefficient of variation of 207.5 per cent. That is a statistical way of saying the heading is not one product. The figures above are facts about particular years' declarations, not a benchmark to price against, and none of them is a Kenyan market price for any machine, ours or anybody else's.

The weight column says that what clears this heading into Kenya is, in the main, the full-size mixer lorry. Kenya's declared 2024 average of 12,269 kg per unit from all origins, and 12,583 kg from China, both sit inside the ordinary band for this heading: across 308 country-years carrying twenty units or more, the median is 13,617 kg per unit with a coefficient of variation of 12.5 per cent, which for customs data is a tight distribution. Three of the sixteen self-loading mixers in our own specification records carry an operating weight — 5,800 kg on one machine and 8,500 kg on two — and all three sit below that band. The comparison points somewhere, but it is not a finding: whether a customs net weight and a specification operating weight are the same measure has never been established in this project, and our own weight analysis says so in its opening line.

The smaller machine answers a different job from the one that weight describes. It is bought where a full-size truck mixer cannot reach the pour: a compound gate in an old district, a rural self-build with no batching plant within useful distance, a road where the pour front moves all day. What decides whether it can serve that job is width, and width is the dimension with no remedy downstream — a height problem has answers at the port, a width problem has none. Our specification records hold sixteen self-loading mixers and five crawler dozers, eleven of the twenty-one published on this site. Ten of the sixteen mixers carry a measured overall dimension; across those ten, width runs from 1.60 m to 2.30 m and length from 4.35 m to 7.06 m. Six mixers carry no measured width at all, and for those we state none. If access is your constraint, put the figure in metres into the enquiry.

Height is a different matter, and this page will not give you a travelling height for most of the range. Only one machine, the SLM-18, has a drawing in our hands that separates the height of the body from the height with the bucket raised. For the other nine measured mixers the height comes from a plant table that does not state which posture was measured, so it is not published here as a travelling height and should not be used as one. Width is barely affected by posture, which is why the width range above stands. The SLM-18's own measured figures are 7.06 m long, 2.21 m wide and 2.58 m high, and its operating weight of 5,800 kg is one of the three recorded across the sixteen mixers. It is the only model named against a specification on this page, because it is the only one whose record is complete enough to publish.

All sixteen mixers carry a configuration list, and those lists are the closest thing we hold to evidence of what the machine does rather than claims about it. Eight name a large water tank with its own feed system, eight independently replaceable mixing teeth, eight a reinforced frame; seven name a drum that lifts and rotates through 270 degrees, seven a driving and mixing camera, seven a self-drawing water controller with an external suction pump; six name articulated steering. Exactly one names an electro-hydraulic weighing scale, which is worth saying out loud, because on-board weighing is the feature most often assumed to run across a whole range. The published range runs 1.0 to 4.5 m³ discharged. One machine loads its own aggregate, mixes on the move and discharges where it stands; this site publishes no output figure, no daily volume, no loads-per-shift and no crew-equivalent, because no plant has put one to us in writing.

Kenya is not in this project's destination shortlist. The six-dimension table behind the markets we publish work on, which scores each on volume, growth, mirror gap, tariff and competitor footprint, holds eighteen countries, and the smallest of them is 226 units; Kenya's 108 on China's 2024 declaration is below every row in it, so Kenya has never been scored on any of those dimensions. Kenya is also absent from the tariff data behind our import duty guide, so no Kenyan duty rate appears on this page, preferential or MFN. We hold no sourced Kenyan ready-mix price per cubic metre, which is the question search suggestions in Kenya rank first on this subject, and the reason it is not answered here. We hold no Kenyan buyer profile, no typical order size and no payment terms. Those are gaps in our own file, not findings about the market.

Two further gaps are recorded rather than guessed. Our Africa research flags the Kenyan pre-export verification regime as its fastest-moving item: two official notices give different figures for the destination-inspection charge on a consignment that arrives without a certificate of conformity, and which inspection body currently handles Chinese-origin construction equipment is marked as needing written confirmation. No rate and no body is named here for that reason. The same file's Kenyan construction growth figures are second-hand transcriptions of a national statistics report whose pages were never opened at source, so they do not appear above. Both are answerable, one by a letter and one by a download, and until they are answered the honest entry is the one already in the file — which is what a buyer is entitled to see, rather than a number that merely looks researched.