United Refineries acquires new stockfeed machine

20 Jul, 2014 - 03:07 0 Views
United Refineries acquires new stockfeed machine

The Sunday News

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BULAWAYO-BASED agro processing company, United Refineries, has procured a $250 000 state-of-the-art stockfeed manufacturing machine from India as part of its diversification strategy, which will see its capacity utilisation increasing to above 80 percent within a year.United Refineries is the second largest cooking oil refinery after Olivine Industries with a refining capacity of 8 000 tonnes of oil seed.
The company’s stock feed product line includes soya bean meal (which is ideal for poultry animals and pigs) as well as cotton hull (which is high in fibre and ideal for cattle, chicks and mushroom growing).

“Stockfeeds are a big part of our future plans and we have recently brought in equipment which will be commissioned in August to produce supplement feed for cattle in the dry season.

“We will be producing on average 4 000 tonnes per month of various cotton-based protein and fibre feeds for the beef and dairy industry,” said United Refineries chief executive officer, Mr Busisa Moyo.

The introduction of stockfeed manufacturing would see production scaling up from between 30 to 40 percent and hovering between 80 to 90 percent.

Mr Moyo said the company’s production levels would largely be determined by the availability of cotton seed.
“Our capacity utilisation is much higher than this time last year on both oils and soaps for the first half of the year, we will even be better at the 80 to 90 percent capacity level when cotton seed deliveries begin,” he said.

Most farmers boycotted growing cotton two years ago in protest against low prices that were being offered by contracting companies, with the latter insisting that they were doing so following a drop of cotton prices on the international market.

“The cotton crop is still short in Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwe Investment Authority is approving investments into oil processing without paying attention to the source of oil seeds and the current cotton seed can only supply 50 percent of installed capacity in the country. We are looking further afield to import seed and substitute cotton for soya bean where we can,” Mr Moyo said.

The company has set its sights at aggressively tapping into the Southern African Development Community market.
“Angola, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique are key targets for our cooking oils, bath soaps and laundry soaps,” Mr Moyo said.
He said: “South Africa remains a key market for our protein concentrate for the beef industry. We are working with ZimTrade to address viable supplies into Angola.”

Mr Moyo said the Buy Zimbabwe concept had played a significant role in ensuring improved sales of their products.
Buy Zimbabwe is a competitiveness and empowerment driver whose mandate is to unlock the country’s potential through a structured aggressive support of the production and consumption of local goods and services. Buy Zimbabwe seeks to actively promote home-grown products for the domestic and global markets.

“The Buy Zimbabwe has positively changed the perception of consumers on local products and brought understanding of the cost of not buying local. We are exporting jobs by buying foreign products especially regular staples and commodities like cooking oil and soap.

“The country is reeling under a huge import-export deficit and the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has revealed that our import bill is worth $4 billion as of 30 June. This is a great cause for concern because we are not generating US dollars through production and neither can we print the US$ in Zimbabwe, eventually we will run into immense illiquidity challenges,” Mr Moyo said.

The Association for Business in Zimbabwe chief executive officer, Dr Lucky Mlilo, said events at United Refineries were exciting arguing that other struggling companies should emulate the oil and soap manufacturer and come up with various survival initiatives to keep their business entities afloat.

“I am glad that most of the companies have started realising that it doesn’t pay to adopt a wait and see attitude with regards to the change of the economy for the better or change in policies. There are some companies which even when capitalised won’t survive this harsh global situation because we are now living in a global village,” Dr Mlilo said.

“United Refineries is one good example that companies need to become very innovative in this harsh economic environment. Bulawayo companies have a tendency of being ‘cry babies’. We need to strike off this tendency and devise survival methods such as diversification,” he said.

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