Business round-up

Inyange to launch new plant Inyange industries Ltd has said that it will launch its new production plant tomorrow with plans to extend its footprints into the regional market. Jean Bosco Kanimba, the company’s Managing Director told journalists at a press conference this week that demand for Inyange’s products had outpaced the company’s production capacity. “The local demand and potential regional market for our products was higher than the previous facilities could supply. With this new plant, we hope to increase our production capacity by tenfold,” said Kanimba. Inyange’s major products include milk, mineral water and juice. The Managing Director said the company seeks to increase production capacity of water, from 1800 liters per hour to 6500 liters, and of juice 750 liters to 5000 per hour.While the new milk cooler capacity machines will boost its processing from 5000 liters per day to 50,000 liters in the first year, in the second and third years it will increase to 65,000 liters and 100,000 liters respectively. “We are also going to diversify products with our new plant and we shall start manufacturing pineapple juice plus maracuja, bottled and packed ice cream as well as butter among others,” explained Kanimba. Kanimba also said that in terms of investment capital and product portfolio, this makes inyange the largest beverage processing company in the region hence giving them a competitive advantage. “The market is very competitive and the biggest challenge is the foreign products that have come in, but with this new plant, our product quality is much better than all the foreign products,” David Alvin Akelola, the Commercial Director said. Inyange, which employs 192 fulltime employees and 77 part-time, has also started exploring the regional market. Rwanda’s BPO to grow 90% by 2020–OTF On The Frontier (OTF) Group’s forecasts suggest that Rwanda’s Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) cluster will grow by 89.4 percent to $274 million by 2020 from $29 million last year. The American competitive consulting firm says that outsourcing is a rapidly growing industry with a market size of $250 billion and estimates future growth leading to services of $750 billion by 2002. It said East African BPO market is expected to grow even faster from $485 million to $1.9 billion with an annual growth of 25 percent for the next five years. “Therefore, the Rwandan private sector must pounce on the opportunity and drive the growth of the BPO cluster by being innovative, productive and efficient,” James Foster the Senior Manager of OTF said Thursday during a workshop organized by Rwanda Development Board (RDB) at Telecom House. He added that BPO, which is the process where a company hires another firm to handle its business activities, offers a route to Rwanda’s international competitiveness. RwandAir plane still stranded in Nairobi RwandAir’s Bombardier CRJ 200 is still grounded in Kenya’s capital Nairobi following last week’s bird strike shortly after takeoff at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. The plane, which operates flight No WB 108 on the Nairobi-Kigali route, made a safe routine pre-cautionary landing back at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport after experiencing the problem. RwandAir’s, Marketing, Public Relations and Events Management Executive, Jackie Tumuhairwe told Business Times that their engineers are working on the aircraft and hopefully by the end of this week the problem will be resolved. Economy to grow by 7-8% in 2010 The Governor of the Central Bank, Francois Kanimba, has said that Rwanda’s economy would grow by between 7 and 8 percent in 2010. He said this during the presentation of the monetary policy and financial stability statement this week in Kigali. The Governor attributed the expected projections on a monetary system driven by sustainable increase in crop productivity through the use of fertilizers and land consolidation. Agriculture has been the major contributor to the national Gross Domestic Product for the last two years. Last year it contributed 10.4 percent and this prompted the government to take the decision of closely working with farmers. “The contribution of agriculture is not accidental but its joint efforts by the government and farmers in the crop intensification programme,” the Minister of Finance, John Rwangombwa, said. Ends