Private Company to Manufacture Ethiopia’s First Sugarcane Crushing Machines

KG Engineering PLC is manufacturing sugarcane crushing machines in a 5.6 million Br contract.

The machinery is being made for the Sugar Corporation, which awarded the contract to the Hibret Manufacturing & Machine Building Industry (HMMBI) – a subsidiary of the Metals & Engineering Corporation (MetEC). Hibret, in turn, passed the contract on to KG, a private company, according to the owner and manager of KG, Kahsay Gebreegziabher. The machines will be used in one of the sugar factories currently under construction by the Corporation.

KG, established in 1986, manufactures construction equipment, such as concrete mixers, block producing machines and bridge bearing plates, as well as truck bodies, fuel tankers, sheet metal bending and cutting machines, and water tankers. Now the company has begun manufacturing industrial cranes, with an Italian company, Lucernini, on a 6,000 ha plot of land in Kality.

The machines to be built include one cardinal and one pusher drum, with a feeder table chain that crushes the sugar cane and transfers it to the main grinding machine, according to Mensur Ahmed, the company’s mechanical engineer. The feeder chains are conveyers, which transport the canes to the larger grinder.

KG was awarded the contract in two phases – first, to bend and roll 30mm thick steel plates and later to include the production of the complete machine, Kahsay said. The contract to roll the steel plates was worth 1.3 million Br, both for the cardinal and pusher drums.

“The feeder chain is 400m long with 18,000 plates attached together; the height of both the pusher and cardinal drums is five metres,” explains Mensur. “All of them are to be made of steel plates called C45, which the HMMBI supplies.

The 35tn pusher drum will stand at the front of the machines and receive the crude cane, crushing it into smaller parts and pushing the chains that take the cane to the next machine.

“This machinery used to be imported; our manufacture is the first of its kind in Ethiopia,” claims Kahsay.

The MetEC’s HMMBI is, by itself, a manufacturer that produces industrial machinery, spare parts, engraving and pressed products, and nuts and bolts for various companies. It was established in 1945 and in 2010 was incorporated under the MetEC.

 


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