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Golden Sibanda Senior Business Reporter
INDUSTRIAL Development Corporation subsidiary Almin Metal Industries has fallen on hard times after volumes dropped drastically, pushing Zimbabwe’s sole extruder of aluminium-based products on the brink of collapse. The company has made an impassioned plea for local procurement of aluminium based products in what management say could help preserve jobs, the scarce capital while guaranteeing high quality products.
Almin Metal Industries general manager Mr Brian Mutandiro said the company was in dire straits after sales volumes fell to unsustainable levels as consumers mostly preferred the lower priced imported products.
The firm, owned 51 percent by IDC and 49 percent by Hulamin Extrusions South Africa, is strategic to Zimbabwe in that most major building structures in the country’s major cities rely on its aluminium profiles.
In Harare, for instance, major buildings including the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, Karigamombe, Throgmorton, Trust Towers and Runhare House were built from aluminium profiles made by Almin Metal Industries.
Nonetheless, the range of the company’s products is wide from aluminium profiles used to construct heavy and light, commercial and domestic structures to cookware, industrial, irrigation and transport equipment as well as profiles for a range of architectural solutions.
Volumes have gone down from an average of 26 tonnes a day in August last year to 18 tonnes in December and further down to 9 tonnes this month, which Mr Mutandiro said the firm could not sustain for long.
Almin Metal Industries has capacity to produce 1 200 tonnes per year, but the about 60 percent of the 500 tonnes the country is consuming annually is made up of imported products, although they are of inferior quality.
“We are in dire straits and contemplating voluntary judicial management in the long term if the situation does not improve, but that would be the last resort we would consider, we do not want to go that route,” he said.
Mr Mutandiro said the company’s products have been crowded by imports and called on Government to consider raising the tariff for aluminium products and encourage local procurement to cushion the firm.
Total imports for the year 2013 are projected to reach US$7,682 billion, while in 2014, US$8,321 billion is what is expected to further drain the little and liquidity in the domestic economy due to low exports.
He pointed that if these alternatives are not adopted in time the company faced the threat of going for voluntary liquidation as the low volumes meant it would soon struggle to meet obligations to its workers.
Further, the company’s 92 workers could soon be put on shorter working hours with the possibility that they could be stopped from coming to work altogether.
The firm can employ 500 workers when operating at full throttle.
“The Ministry of Finance and Economic Development, within its powers can put some tariffs and Zimbabwe will be able to go forward because we would also have save (scarce) foreign currency,” Mr Mutandiro said.
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