2merkato

Representatives from Ethiopia’s metal industry discussed the challenges facing the sector at meeting held last week.

Challenges include price increases, power cuts, taxes, the supply of scrap metal, capital shortages and the monopoly of the Ethiopian Shipping and Logistic Enterprise had the Ethiopian Association of Basic Metals and Engineering Industries to call for a public-private dialogue forum to support the sector.

The competitive advantage of domestic industries is adversely affected by the 5% import duty imposed on scrap metal exports while the finished product is imported duty free according to participants at the meeting suggesting the lift of import duty or develop a duty drawback scheme for domestic industry.

Sugar cane plantations are under development in Ethiopia on 6000 hectares of land in Southern Omo. The plantations are intended to serve the six Omo Kuraz Sugar factories.

The plantations are part of plans to cover 15 hectares ever year for the coming five years said Tilahun Deneke, Head of the Omo Kuraz Sugar Development Project Office.

Ethiopia has allocated 225 million US dollars for the development of each factory to be constructed by the Metal and Engineering Corp. The assessment and design of the Omo Kuraz Sugar projects is currently underway under the supervision of the Southern Ethiopia Design and Supervision Enterprise and the Ethiopian Waterworks Design and Supervision Enterprise.

Premium Print plc is to build a factory with the potential to produce 40,000 toner cartridges annually in Ethiopia.

The company, in partnership with EC Solutions, A British company, plans to substitute the import of toner cartridges into the country as well as to export to the regional market.

Premium Print launched the assembly of toner cartridges three months ago with a monthly production rate of 200 cartridges at a workshop it is renting until it acquires land to build its factory.

Fafa Foods SC has become the first company to produce full cream milk powder in Ethiopia.

The company has introduced ten new products including, flour, instant yeast, soya milk corn flakes and a range of snacks since it was turned over to new management.

Fafa is working to meet local demand through import substitution with locally prepared alternatives costing an average of 40% less than the imported varites said Dr. Berhanu Mosissa, Director of Sales and Marketing with the company.

Ethiopia revealed plans to develop 46 additional projects in the textile industry by 2015 to increase the revenue from the sector to 2.5 billion US dollars at the end of the time.

It is expected that six of the projects will become operational during the next financial year with a further 18 being launched in the year after; the remaining 22 will be operational in the years up to the end of the 5 years GTP period, 2015.

Two of the anticipated projects are expected to be cotton ginning industries; four are spinning industries, a knitting industry, seven weaving and one finished woven textile industry.