The Sunday News
Dickson Mangena, Business Reporter
BULAWAYO steel and cast iron manufacturer, Meprine Founders and Engineers, is seeking big space to expand its operations buoyed by increased production as the company targets foreign markets.
Company managing director Mr Prince Gobvu said with new exports to countries like Botswana, South Africa and Zambia the space they were operating from was now too small.
He said two years ago, the company approached the city council requesting for more land but nothing has been communicated to that regard.
“Our premises are now small for us to produce as much as we would want to and we had applied to the city council some two years ago for extra space but they have not yet given us feedback. We are deliberately reducing our product line because there is no more space to store our products, by products and raw material,” said Mr Gobvu.
He said business started peaking in 2010 after the company started working with ZimTrade when they were just a small to medium company and through the trade body’s assistance they are now a medium to big company.
“Our success in the last few years has not been because we are clever but it is because we got some help from ZimTrade who helped us find foreign markets. They did free marketing for us in some of the foreign markets that we are supplying now,” Mr Gobvu said.
He also said that his company has in the past few months supplied about 1 500 to 2 000 manhole covers to South Africa and other regional companies.
“We have supplied orders of about 500 manhole covers to Polokwane’s Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) houses and we are looking forward to supplying more. We are currently working with our distributor so that we supply Build It in South Africa with our products,” he said.
Mr Gobvu said the company is looking forward to go into the manufacture of round bars in the future.
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