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_
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