Mozambique’s Dugongo Cimentos intends to start mining limestone in the district of Mossuril, Nampula province, in the north of the country, with the aim of complementing the raw material for cement production at the new factory under construction in Nacala-Porto.
“The company is already on the ground carrying out the environmental impact study and community consultations to make it feasible to exploit the natural resource, which will supply the factory under construction,” said Casimiro Ussene, director of Economic Activities in Mossuril.
According to information published on Sunday, November 19, by Rádio Moçambique, the district has a large forest reserve with various species and valuable minerals.
Valued at 200 million dollars, the cement company’s new industrial complex is being built on an area of 50 hectares and construction work is expected to take 18 months. It will have the capacity to produce two million tons of cement a year and will generate 600 direct jobs.
Mozambique Dugongo Cimentos is owned by the SPI (Mozambican) and West China Cement Limited (Chinese) business groups. SPI has a vast business portfolio and has been associated with the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) by research institutions.
The first plant, located in the Matutuíne district, 70 kilometers from the city of Maputo, has a production capacity of two million tons of cement per year.
As soon as it entered the national market in May 2021, Dugongo charged much lower cement prices than those it had been charging, leading other operators to accuse the company of disloyalty and of causing the bankruptcy of other cement companies and layoffs in the sector.
After months of activity and very low prices, the company raised the cost of cement to levels close to those practiced by the cement companies forced to close.
On September 12, 2022, Dugongo guaranteed that it would pay the 20.5 million meticais penalty imposed at the time for anti-competitive practices, a fine decreed by the Competition Regulatory Authority on the grounds that the company had not answered the regulator’s questions about methodologies for calculating sales prices.
