Addis Fortune (Addis Ababa)
Wudineh Zenebe
1 September 2008
The first spinning factory in the country opened its operations yesterday.
Adama Development Plc invested 160 million Br to construct the cotton plant at Adama (Nazareth) on 33,324Sqm plot of land.
Owned by Feleke Bekele and his wife Meaza Tereda, the factory, which opened for business on Saturday, August 30, is supposed to process 10tn of cotton a day.
The civil works of the factory in the town 100Km east of Addis Abeba in Oromia Regional State were constructed by Norinco-Lalibela Engineering & Construction Share Company (NORI-LA), with assistance from G.T Consultants S.C.
NORI-LA is an international share company established by a joint venture agreement on April 7, 2004, between Chinese and Ethiopian enterprises with a total capital of around 34 million dollars.
The laboratories of the factory were constructed by an Italian company, Munsden, while a one kilometre underground air conditioning tunnel was built by the Swiss company, Luwa AG.
In 1935, brothers Hans C. and Walter A. Bechtler founded Zurich's Luwa AG to manufacture and install automatic heating, air conditioning and ventilation systems. The name was derived from the first syllables of the German words Luft, for air, and Waerme, for heat.
The company that installed the main production plant of the Adama factory is Swiss firm RIETER, who won the bid ahead of nine international suppliers. The contract between Adama and RIETER was signed on February 23, 2006. RIETER was established in 1795 and has 13,500 employees worldwide.
Manager of the new factory, Workagegnehu H. Giorgis, is confident that the contractors have done an excellent job.
"The machineries of the factory are the latest in the world," he told Fortune. "Our works will have quality."
A Government representative agreed with this assessment. "The company is established with state of the art technologies," Tadesse Haile, state minister for Trade and Industry, said.
With its modern machinery, the factory is expected to be capital intensive and have few employees, despite the industry being labour intensive.
The Federal Government wants to see the country's exports grow by nine per cent annually. One of the Government's priority sectors in trying to achieve this target is the textile sector, which is projected to earn 500 million dollars in exports in 2011.
Adama plans to export 80pc of its products, while supplying the rest to domestic markets.
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