The Sunday News
Dumisani Nsingo, Senior Business Reporter
BULAWAYO City Council’s commercial undertaking – Ingwebu Breweries — has started refurbishing its opaque beer brewery plant in the city and increased its distribution vehicles following a capital injection of $2 million as it forges ahead to keep its business entity afloat.
Ingwebu Breweries sales, marketing and corporate affairs manager Mr Nkosana Ndlovu confirmed that refurbishment of the 66-year-old opaque beer plant was underway but could not be drawn into divulging when the project was going to be completed only saying “it would depend on the availability of funding”.
Last year, the company said it needed $4 million to embark on extensive upgrading of its brewery plant as well as purchasing distribution vehicles.
The plant produces 100 million litres of the traditional brew a year and the refurbishment taking place at the brewery is part of the company’s efforts to make it compatible with latest technologies in a bid to increase its efficiency and its packaging quality.
“The plant itself is quite old. We need technology, which cost a lot of money,” he said.
Mr Ndlovu said the company had since purchased new haulage trucks in an effort to improve its fleet which was always undergoing repairs while most of it was already grounded.
“Rolling stock is not as difficult as refurbishing that plant because as long as we still have that capacity to make new markets we just have to do it (buy new distribution vehicles).
“It’s either we buy new rolling stock or we hire it but the customer must be serviced. So it’s not the same as increasing capacity and switching from one line to the other those are two different things,” Mr Ndlovu said. City of Bulawayo Commercialised Entities business committee chairman Councillor Rodney Jele acknowledged that Ingwebu has explored new markets following acquisition of a new distribution fleet.
“The main reason why we were unable to reach out to other markets was due to bad infrastructure whereby our roads were in a bad state and our trucks experienced challenges to reach out to particular areas and part of our fleet was down but we have recently acquired a couple of haulage trucks that’s why we are now able to take our products to many markets,” he said.
In the last few years, Ingwebu was forced to shut down several of its beer gardens dotted around the country due to low demand of opaque beer.
However, last year, the undertaking moved from loss to profit as evidenced by the improved profit margins which saw it moving from a negative 7,7 percent to a positive 9,3 percent.
The company recently launched its sorghum mahewu drink and has set sights at adding four flavours namely banana, strawberry, apricot and vanilla.
