Zambia Sugar
| Zambia Sugar | |
|---|---|
| legal form | Corporation |
| founding | around 1968 |
| Seat | Mazabuka, Zambia
|
| Branch | Food industry |
Zambia Sugar is a Zambian public company based in Mazabuka , Nakambala Estate . 82% of the shares are held by Illovo Sugar , a subsidiary of British Sugar .
Founded in the late 1960s, Zambia Sugar is a multinational company with production facilities in Zambia around Mazabuka and the Luena Sugar Plantation in Luapula Province and outside the Republic of South Africa (39%), Malawi (31%), Swaziland (19%) , Mauritius (8%) and USA (3%). Further production facilities in Tanzania and Mozambique are still in the investment stage. Sugar products contribute 59 percent to its profit, sugar cane cultivation 23 percent and other products such as gin , diacetyl , acetone , syrup and ethanol 18 percent.
In 2001 Zambia Sugar processed 1.2 million tons of sugar cane from its own cultivation and produced 209,000 tons of sugar from it. The national demand was 110,000 t, the rest was exported, of which 14,000 t to Europe and 10,000 t to South Africa. In the Mazabuka area, Zambia Sugar is by far the largest employer.
Sugar production is extremely difficult to forecast because of the dependence on the weather. Fluctuations of 25 percent are not exceptional. A harvest estimate for Mazabuka can be given as "800,000 to 5.4 million t", with the lower limit indicating extreme drought and the upper limit indicating good irrigation. If Zambia exported 14,000 t to the EU in 2001 and almost 40,000 t in 2006, this difference is reflected in this. Furthermore, sugar cane processing will increasingly turn to the production of chemical products.