By Ebele Orakpo & Naomi Uzor
Mr. Santosh Pillai is the
Managing Director, West Africa, PZWilmar Limited. In this chat with
Financial Vanguard at the company’s factory in Lagos during the recent
ISO 22000:2005 certificate presentation to the company by Bureau
Veritas.
He spoke on the company’s backward integration programme,
saying that although Nigeria was once the world’s biggest exporter if
palm oil, she currently imports over 350,000 tonnes of palm oil yearly.
Excerpts:
Backward integration: According
to Pillai, the goal of PZ Wilmar, the joint venture between PZ Cussons
and Wilmar International, is to take Nigeria back to her glorious days
as a world leader in palm oil production.
“When we started this palm oil refinery, we simultaneously started
our backward integration process. That means we started to grow oil palm
in Nigeria.
Nigeria was the world’s leader in oil palm in the 1960s and 1970s and
Malaysia and Indonesia took the know-how from Nigeria and over the last
30, 40 years, they have perfected it and have now become world leaders
in oil palm production.
So the intention of PZ Wilmar is to restore Nigeria to its former
position as world leader in oil palm production, therefore, we are not
only putting up a refinery here, which has a capacity of 1,000 tons per
day, but we are also interested in growing oil palm. We, therefore, set
out on a journey to set up 50,000 hectares of oil palm plantation in
Cross River State.
If you visit Cross River State today, we have already acquired 26,500
hectares of land and we are growing the oil palm at Calaro Oil Palm
Estate; Ibiae Oil Palm Estate and an estate in Biase.
Apart from these, we also acquired the 12,800-hectare oil palm
plantation from Obasanjo Farms. The ex-president has his own plantations
in Cross River State and we acquired the plantations in 2012.
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