Ethio Water to Join Flourishing Market

Ker Water S.C. invested 90 million Br to set up a water bottling company in the Southern Nations, Nationalities & People’s regional state. The new product, branded Ethio Water, will be available in the market by the end of this month.

Located in the Cheha wereda of Gurage Zone, 146Km southwest of Addis Abeba. Ker Water, a three-year-old company, received 20,000Sqm of land as an investment and constructed the plant on a 2,700Sqm plot, which consists of warehouses, offices and the production floors. Further expansion is planned to be initiated in the next three months.

The plant has a bottling capacity of 6,000 one-litre bottles an hour and 8,000 half-litre bottles an hour. It can produce 144,000L of water a day and 36,000L an hour with the planned expansion.

Ethio Water has already received the green light to start operations from the Ethiopian Conformity Assessment Enterprise and the Food and Drug Authority.

The company will be available in the market in packages of water bottles with a capacity ranging from half a litre to two litres of water sourced from spring water.

This will make Ethio Water the 72nd water bottling company in Ethiopia, most of which are located in the Oromia Regional State. Although 3.5 billion bottles of water are produced a year, these companies are only able to satisfy five percent of consumption.

But their numbers have significantly gone up over the past couple of years, with Wub Water entering the market last October. Located in Amhara Regional State, Wub Water invested 140 million Br for a plant capacity of 10,000 bottles an hour.

Azemi Engineering constructed the facilities, which took two years to complete, and the machinery was imported from Turkey at a cost of nearly 30 million Birr.