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The Dangote Industries Limited, producers of Dangote cement, has given its commitment to increase its activities in Ghana, especially by scaling up the volume of its cement on the Ghanaian market. Company officials said although its operations in the country had come with several challenges, the company was more keener and poised to make a gigantic impact on the Ghanaian market and the economy. The company has spent the past three years looking for limestone deposits in commercial quantities which are vested in the state so it can start the production of clinker locally in addition to the bagging of cement which it does on a smaller scale from its plant in Tema. Locally produced clinker will save Ghana a lot of foreign exchange. For example, if Ghana consumes about three million tonnes of imported clinker a year for cement production, given that the landed cost per tonne in Ghana is US$90, the Bank of Ghana would spend US$270 million a year to support this importation. This has greater consequences on the country�s reserve and puts pressure on the exchange rate, lowering the value of the cedi, which has a lot of micro and macroeconomics consequences for the country. The Vice Chairman of the Dangote Group, who is also in charge of the Ghanaian market, Alhaji Tajudeen Adesina Sijuade, told the GRAPHIC BUSINESS during a facility tour of the company�s modern plant that for the mean time products from the Ibese factory, which could produce six million tonnes of cement annually, would feed the Ghanaian market. The factory is also the second largest cement factory in Nigeria and West Africa, after Dangote�s Obajana plant. Alhaji Sijuade explained that the products would be brought in both as bulk cement for bagging at its packing terminal at Tema and also in the form of already bagged 50kg cement on trucks and marine vessels. Currently supplying 750,000 tonnes of cement a year to the Ghanaian market, the country director of Dangote Cement told the GRAPHIC BUSINESS that from 2013, Greenview International Limited, which distributes the Dangote Cement locally, would distribute 1.5 million tonnes a year. The company supplies high strength cement (42.5R), as against a relatively lower strength (32.5N) cement that is usually available on the Ghanaian market. �We are expanding the capacity of the Ibese plant, which already has two mills which produce a total of six million tonnes a year, with two more units of mills and storage capacity for clinker to produce 12 million tonnes a year. This will be big enough to supply the entire West African sub region,� Alhaji Sijuade stated. The company started operations in Ghana in 2007 and already controls more than 11 per cent of the cement market in Ghana, directly employing about 447 persons across the value chain. The modern and fully automated plant at Ibese is one of the fastest cement producing plants around the world. Designed and built by the Chinese, the engineers assembled the best machinery for every unit of the plant from notable source countries across the world. The source countries include Germany, France, the United States, the United Kingdom and China. Currently, the company employs about 200 Chinese and 100 Indian workers at the plant, who are operating the machine and helping to transfer skills to young Nigerian workers to run the factory. This is aside of the over 9,000 direct employment the plant generates for factory hands; truck drivers; laboratory technicians; packers, technicians, masons, carpenters and kitchen staff. Interestingly, the giant Dangote Cement factory at Ibese does not suffer from the epileptic power challenge that Nigeria is faced with, as the factory produces its own power. The plant has three Siemens thermal plants that generate 37MW of power each. The tricycle power plants rely on natural gas pumped in by a 20-kilometre pipeline; it can also be fired by coal and diesel. The over US$2 billion plant, located on a 2,500 hectare land, started operations last year. The plant feeds on a nearby 30-kilometre squared limestone deposit with a lifespan of 100 years. The mine is also replete with Shale and laterite, both raw materials (minerals) for the production of clinker. The Dangote Group itself engages undertakes the surface mining of the minerals to feed the factory. This means that the only mineral Dangote Industries imports for the production of its cement is gypsum, as Nigeria does not produce that in commercial quantity, even though it has the deposits. The vice chairman said the company was still looking for limestone deposits in Ghana which were vested in the state so that it would make investing less risk, saying it was the only thing preventing the company from starting its own production plant.