A domestically-owned edible oil processing plant worth five billion Br, equivalent to the minimum paid-up capital required to establish a bank, has kicked off its operations. WA Oil Factory, built under the watch of its major shareholder and Chief Executive Officer, Worku Aytenew, the renowned businessperson involved in different sectors, has been under construction for almost five years.

The construction was handled by Chinese contractors, while expatriates were hired during the installation of machinery, commissioning, and testing periods. It will be inaugurated by the end of next week in the presence of government officials and other guests.

Having the capacity to process 1.3 million litres of edible oil daily, the plant is located in East Gojjam Zone, Amhara Regional State. It is the ninth investment of the WA group, which has been involved in the mining, aviation, farming, real estate, petroleum, and water bottling sectors as well as the trading and distribution of imported oil.

Having its head office in Addis Abeba, the new plant can also crush and produce edible oil from niger seed, sesame seed, peanut, soya bean, and haricot bean, besides being able to process crude palm oil imported from abroad.

Even though the factory's civil works were completed earlier this year, its management had been waiting until the state-owned Ethiopian Electric Power builds a transformer and connects it with the national grid. Four megawatts of electricity is needed to run the factory.

"We're getting enough amounts of electricity to run the factory," said Alazar Ahmed, chief marketing officer of WA. "Testing has been completed successfully." With a target of creating a linkage with at least 2,500 farmers to source raw materials, the factory has already stocked inputs needed to fully start production, according to him. "We have applied the latest German technology to run our machines," the marketing chief added.

WA is the third edible oil factory to be inaugurated this year. With an investment capital of 4.5 billion Birr, Phibela Industrial, having the potential of processing 1.6 million litres a day, was inaugurated in February 2021. A month later, another factory in Dire Dawa, Shemu Plc, officially began its operations with a daily production capacity of 220,000 litres of edible oil, investing 1.6 billion Br thus far. While both started production with a refinery, WA wants to buck the trend.

"Aiming to save foreign currency, we'd like to source our raw materials from farmers," Alazar said. But he did not hide the difficulty of accessing inputs locally because of the low production of agricultural commodities in the country.