Dangotes $100 million truck assembly company to launch next week

Dangote Group of Companies is set to start its truck assembly plant in Lagos next week- The plant will produce about 10,000 trucks annually

The truck assembly plant will create 3000 job vacancies for Nigeria

Dangote Group of companies has announced on Wednesday, January 18, its intention to launch its $100 million truck assembly plant by next week.
The executive director of Dangote Group, Edwin Devakumar, made the announcement in Lagos.

The chief corporate communication officer of Dangote Group, Mr Anthony Chiejina had earlier announced the project, on Sunday, January 15, sayingDangote would be partnering with a leading Chinese Company, National Heavy Duty Truck Group Company Limited, SINOTRUKto produce trucks used mainly for haulage from its newly promoted assembly plant at Ikeja, Lagos.

Devakumar on Wednesday said:“It aimsto meet an expected increased demand for transport in the country as the government focuses on boosting agriculture and farmers need to move goods across the vast country.

“The Dangote Group has a fleet size of 12,000 trucks and large users. One of the biggest challenges in the market today is logistics because we do not have a proper transport network.

“The joint venture, which is 65 per cent owned by Dangote and 35 per cent by Sinotruck, will assemble components and knocked down parts imported from Sinotruck to the Nigerian plant.”

He said the plant had the capacity to assemble 16 trucks a day and would export to West Africa, adding that the facility would expand into vehicle manufacturing.Last March Dangote bid for a majority stake in Peugeot Automobile Nigeria. The results of the sale have not yet been released, punch report.

Turning to Dangote’s other interests, Devakumar said the group was on track to launch its $17bn oil refinery plant with the first crude for processing goinginto the plant in October 2019.He said:“It will handle 650,000 barrels per day.

“The company will scale down operations in its flour milling, sugar refinery and tomato processing businesses however, due to dollar shortages to fund the import of raw materials.

“Where the foreign exchange is not available we are cutting down our operations.“For example, we had a vegetable oil refinery we have shut down; we had a tomato based processing plant we haveshut down.”

Meanwhile, the latest Bloomberg Billonaires' Index released few weeks backrevealed that Africa's richest person, Alhaji Aliko Dangote lost$4.9 billion or one-third of in 2016.

According to the index, the combined effect of falling oil prices and the naira devaluation in June pushed the president of Dangote Group to the 112th richest person in the world with a net worth of $10.4 billion. Before the index, Dangote was the world’s 46th-richest person as of June last year