Illovo to resume sugar exports April
Sugar producer, Illovo Sugar Malawi, has said it is set to resume commodity exports in April, months after it temporarily suspended the sales last year to address supply challenges on the domestic market.
Illovo Sugar Malawi Managing Director Lekani Katandula told journalists in Blantyre on Tuesday that the exports are expected to resume following a pickup in production.
“We voluntarily suspended exports because we wanted to address supply challenges in terms of the domestic market but we will be resuming the exports very soon, hopefully by April.
“This is as long as the weather is much better because one of the other challenges we had last year was Cyclone Ana and the subsequent heavy rains that we continue to experience that disrupted production,” Katanduka said.
He said due to the disruptions, the company’s total production fell by 50,000.
He, however, expressed optimism that with the good weather Malawi is experiencing, the company should be able to resume production by mid- April.
“That will also be the point that we can confidently resume exporting sugar and hopefully export more because we are very aware that as a country, the more we can export, the better for the market and for everybody but we cannot start exporting at the expense of the local supply of sugar,” Katandula said.
On Tuesday this week, Illovo Malawi held an investors’ forum where it announced that its total revenue significantly improved in the year ending August 2022.
Katandula said the company recorded a 30 percent profit-after-tax increase from K20.5 billion to K26.6 billion despite a significant reduction in total production from 279,000 tonnes to 230,000 tonnes.
Eric Msikiti is a Senior Reporter/News Producer at Times Group. Though relatively young, Eric boasts years of experience in Malawi’s media industry.
