Flour Mills Nigeria Plc is set to build a N45billion Sugar Plant in Niger Sate that is bound to give the market leader Dangote Sugar some competition. News of the inauguration of the plant was reported in several dailies including the Guardian which we culled below
The Federal Government has inaugurated a N45 billion integrated, state-of-the-art sugar project in Sunti, Niger State. The project, wholly owned by Flour Mills of Nigeria Plc, (FMN) and comprising a 16,500 hectare sugarcane estate and mill, is part of the Ministry of Industry and Investment’s approved Backward Integration Programme (BIP) for the production of local sugar in line with the provisions of the National Sugar Master Plan (NSMP).
Already, the company has invested N16 billion while the entire project is expected to be completed and commissioned before the end of 2016. When completed, the project is expected to produce 100, 000 metric tons of sugar annually; create 15,000 direct and indirect jobs, generate 10MW of electricity, produce animal feed and fertilizer as a by-product and save the country over $50million yearly in foreign exchange.
Dangote Sugar already has a refining capacity of over 1.3million metric tones (which it also plans to double by 2017) and controls about 70% of the Sugar market. Dangote Sugar is estimated to have pushed out volumes of about 250,000 metric tons the first 9 months of this year. It will be interesting to see how this impacts on each company’s bottom line.
