departments in the head office but has also been cascaded throughout all levels of the organisation. It is also present in the brewery near Enugu, a city of one million inhabitants, located a 50-minute flight east of Lagos. The brewery, which has a capacity of 500,000 hectolitres, is meanwhile operating round the clock, seven days a week but, despite this, it cannot yet cope with the enormous demand. Expansion seems to be the logical solution for the capacity problem, but the brewery site of eight hectares does not offer enough space and is also enclosed by the built-up area of the surrounding village. This is why Nigerian Breweries is focusing attention again on a site of one hundred hectares that it bought in 1983 with the aim of building a new brewery there. Just after the land had been purchased, the economic recession struck and Nigerian Breweries decided to put the new brewery plans on the back burner for the time being. In 1993 Nigerian Breweries had a stroke of luck when the Diamond Brewery was put up for sale. That purchase gave it a presence with a brewery in the region after all. In February 2001, the decision was finally taken: Nigerian Breweries is to build a new brewery in Enugu with an initial capacity of 1.5 million hectolitres. Heineken made this decision possible because on December 15th 2000, Heineken exercised the option of converting its loan of EUR 71 million to Nigerian Breweries into equity (bringing the stake from 43.3 per cent to 54.2 per cent after the conversion). This money forms a substantial part of the costs of building the new brewery. The first bottles of beer are scheduled to come off the filling line two years from now. The intention is that within three years of production start-up the brewery will expand its output to 3 million m I CM hectolitres. The brewery will be state of the art with much attention UJ paid to automated processing. That will mean extra attention for e> training and education of the personnel. Although people realise o_ Please turn to page 26 I

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World of Heineken | 2001 | | pagina 23