Along the Ras Mekonnen Street, commonly known as Stadium, stands the newly inaugurated headquarters of Wegagen Bank. Standing at more than two dozen storeys and stretched over almost 28,000sqm of land, the building is visible from most corners of the city.
At the inaugural ceremony held at the building’s premises on September 30, 2017, (pictured above right to left) President Mulatu Teshome (PhD); Diriba Kuma, mayor of Addis Abeba; Teferi Zewdu, Wegagan Bank’s board-chairman; and Eshetu Gelan (PhD), a shareholder and manager of ETG Designers & Consultants S.C were present.
ETG was responsible for designing the headquarters, which has meeting halls, shops, offices and three underground floors meant solely for parking. For the construction, the Bank had chosen the Chinese state-owned China Jiangxi Corporation for International Economic & Technical Cooperation (CJIC). Starting construction in 2011, the contractor was able to finish erecting the 107m tall building with a budget close to a billion Birr.
Wegagen, whose headquarter previously resided in Dembel Building, along Africa Avenue, is one of the few banks that have already fulfilled the Central Bank’s directive to hold a paid-up capital of over two billion Birr. It has 232 bank branches with a plan to build a premium branch on the ground floor of the new headquarters. As the fifth most profitable bank in Ethiopia, it had made a profit of almost 800 million Birr in last fiscal year.