eBusiness Weekly
Oliver Kazunga
LEADING clothing manufacturer, Paramount Textiles, plans to set up two solar power plants in Harare and Bulawayo with a combined output of 1,75MW, a development expected to boost the company’s efficiency through electricity supply.
Of late, a number of private companies have embarked on initiatives to invest in solar projects to beef up their power supply requirements.
This is on the back of subdued generation by the country’s power utility, Zesa, owing to Zimbabwe’s lack of investment in new power projects in recent years.
Since 2010, the Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority has licensed over 100 Independent Power Producers (IPPs) and only a few are generating electricity due to various reasons among them lack of funding to implement the projects.
In a recent interview, Paramount Textiles executive director, Jeremy Youmans, said the planned projects have a combined value of between US$3 million and US$4 million.
“The Harare solar plant will be at least 1MW and Bulawayo maybe 0,75MW. The investment will be around between US$3 million and US$4 million depending on how we do it.
“We had meetings with various parties, with manufacturers from China, Japan and Germany that we were considering in 2019 so, nothing much has been done for the last two years unfortunately, because of the pandemic (Covid-19),” he said.
Covid-19 was first detected in China in December 2019 before spreading to the rest of the world.
On the economic front, the global health crisis affected trade and investment trade as countries adopted the World Health Organisation guidelines such as national lockdowns and travel restrictions to curb the spread of the respiratory disease.
To date, the respiratory infection has claimed millions of people across the globe.
Despite its adverse effects on trade and investment in the last two years, Youmans said his organisation has managed to stay in touch with suppliers of the planned solar power plants.
At present, the company’s Harare and Bulawayo factories employ a congregated figure of about 2 000 people.
However, the targeted figure has not been attained due to a host of challenges, chief among them, the Covid-19-induced disturbances.
In 2015, Archer Clothing creditors who were owed US$14 million approved the company’s take-over by Paramount, saving it from liquidation.
“A lot of people left us during this (Covid-19) time, quite a lot have come back but we are still down, we want to get up to a higher capacity as we can,” he said, adding that their exports were steady but still on the low side particularly to Europe.
Both Harare and Bulawayo factories are presently operating at about 60 percent capacity utilisation.
“So, if we can get another 50 percent of the current employment figure, as l said from 2 000 to 3 000, that would be getting us to about 90 percent of capacity utilisation,” said Youmans.
As part of initiatives to contribute to the cotton-to-clothing value chain, back in 2005 and 2008, the company rolled out a cotton outgrower scheme.
“We have a little bit of experience in that (outgrower scheme), but the reality is although we did our farmers to get a very good high yield, there was a bottleneck at the textile industry that they had capacity that could not take the cotton and we continued to export nearly all the cotton.
“So,our role is to try and develop the clothing industry.
“At the moment, if you build a big textile mill to produce lots of fabric, who are you going to sell it to if you have a very small clothing industry, and all you are going to do is to export it and compete with everybody sending it thousands of miles away,” he said.
At its peak, the clothing industry employed 35 000 people directly, but the figure plummeted to 6000 at present due to challenges in the macro-economic environment.
“Our role is to help the clothing industry as much as we can in developing it so that the investment will be attracted into the textile industry.
“The textile industry are the ones that should then be investing in the cotton to get the cotton they need,” said Youmans.
