Presco unveils expansion plan, invests $1b

In a bid to further boost oil palm production in the country, Presco Oil Palm Plc has unveiled plans to expand its production capacity by building a new refinery.

Indeed, under the expansion plan, the company is expected to stake $30 million on the project to boost oil palm production in the country. Similarly, the company noted that its investment profile in the country has grown beyond $1 billion within the last decade.

With the company bringing in a minimum of $100 million investment into the country yearly for the past ten years, the company’s total investment in the country has risen over a billion dollars during the period.

The Chairman of the company, Pierre Vandebeeck, explained that the investment which includes procuring high quality state-of-the-art ‎equipment, automated steam turbines and a biogas plant for power generation, oil palm processing mills, refineries and plants and machineries is the first of its kind in West Africa.

Vandebeeck in a statement made available to The Guardian, said the company is going forward by building a new refinery and oil mill that would gulp another $30 million to boost oil palm production in Nigeria In his words: “I have not done the feasibility study yet but the cost estimate for the oil mill is about $20 million and the refinery is $10 million summing up to a $30 million investment.

A hectare of new plantation is about $6000 so multiply that to know how much we are investing every year. We are not stopping. “We are like a vehicle driving very fast all the time, although I do say should we slow down a bit but there are so many opportunities that come up that we do not want to miss and therefore you are more or less pushed to continue investing‎”.

Meanwhile, the company has announced the appointment of its first Nigerian Managing Director, Felix Nwabuko, to guide the company to success in its goal of remaining the most innovative and reliable operator in the sector globally.

Nwabuko, with vast experience spanning about three decades, in KPMG, Siat Group, University College, London among others has been appointed to drive the company towards its set objectives.

Also, the Presco chairman said the company has just began a new chapter by acquiring a biotechnology company in Belgium to produce high performing planting materials to achieve greater and quality yields.

“We are the only company in this industry in the world that has succeeded in cloning rubber trees. We started two years ago and will be planting our first cloned rubber trees in Ivory Coast and Ghana because we believe through this system we will be increasing the rubber yields by about 30 per cent per hectares but I believe it will be more,” he said. ‎

He noted that for the past ten years, Presco has been investing in what he described as a genetic block of oil palm having over 200 different crosses ‎and varieties from all over the world, saying that the company will propagate and make it available to anyone willing to pay the price.

“We have the first result for this and five years after planting, we added 20,000,000 per hectares with an extraction rate of 29 per cent and this means we are doubling the oil yields per hectare of what is coming now.‎ We are doing the same thing ‎for cocoa because personally I believe in three crops, which are rubber, oil palm and cocoa.

We are going to produce high performing clones that are disease resistant, he said. He pointed out that the investment, which is recurrent, and ‎gulping a lot of resources is a project not only for the company but also for farmers to use for growing high quality yields in their various farms across the country. ‎

“This is an investment that is recurrent and gulping a lot of money. We have the best scientist working on this project. We are making this project available not for our plantations. I consider our company as a commercial entity where we have our presence in different parts of the continent, growing platforms to produce top planting materials for whoever wants to buy it,” he said.