Carlsberg Malawi seeks to cut imports
Carlsberg Malawi Limited has put in place measures to respond to the current shortage of foreign exchange by sourcing some of the raw materials such as malt and plastic on the local market.
The brewer’s officials said this last Thursday when they appeared before the Budget and Finance Committee of Parliament in response to a query on how their value addition to production has improved in the last 45 years of operations in Malawi.
The company imports malt for its Carlsberg beers from its parent company in Denmark while concentrates for Coca-Cola products such as Fanta and Sprite are imported from the parent company’s designated supplier in Swaziland, according to Carlsberg Malawi managing director Gavin Brown.
However, the company has since started sourcing locally bottle tops for the soft drinks line produced by the Southern Bottlers (Sobo), its subsidiary company.
“There are many instances where we have made huge strides in terms of localising our procurement and that is a major strategic direction for Carlsberg Malawi because of the risk of availability of foreign exchange,” Brown told the committee.
He said the company has constraints in terms of Carlsberg beer because the recipe requires them to import the malt, which is a major component of the company’s cost.
Brown also disclosed that the company has also substituted 30 percent of imported malt for Carlsberg Chill by using rice which is sourced locally.
Carlsberg Malawi, a subsidiary of dual-listed Press Corporation Limited (PCL), is also working with an unnamed local farmers’ group to experiment the use of cassava, which is produced into a wet cake that the company can use as a substitute for imported malt.
Brown told the committee there have been positive experiments with the KucheKuche beer with cassava malt which has proven to be positive thus far.
On its non-alcoholic beverages line, he said plastic bottles for soft drinks, bottled water and orange squash are sourced locally.
In 2014, Carlsberg Malawi, which is one of the major taxpayers, contributed K20 billion to the tax revenue mostly through excise tax and value added tax (VAT) on its products.
