Almeda Textile is the biggest textile manufacturing company in Ethiopia plans to upgrade factory equipment and training staff to increase revenue by 50 percent to $30 million a year by 2018. It sells clothes to Swedish fashion chain Hennes & Mauritz AB.
The company will invest in its only plant near the city of Adwa, in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region. The company, which began operations in 1998, could supply Stockholm-based H&M with more than 4,000 t-shirts a day next year if productivity improves. If the company can boost capacity and reliability at the plant, H&M may increase its orders, Almeda’s General Manager Libelo Gebreselassie said in an interview on Monday.
Libelo further said that about 90 percent of Almeda’s dyed fabrics and garments are sold in Ethiopia, with large orders from the army and police force for uniforms . The company’s sales will probably be $20 million in the fiscal year ending July 7, up from annual revenue of about $15 million in the two previous years.
Almeda has about 2500 employees principled, creative, dynamic and professional people.
Almeda is owned by the Endowment Fund for the Rehabilitation of Tigray, a group of companies started in the mid-1990s by the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front party that’s a founding member of Ethiopia’s ruling coalition. It’s been supplying H&M, Europe’s second biggest clothing retailer, since 2013.
Ethiopia’s government plans to invest about $1 billion a year in export-focused industrial parks that will contain textile factories among other manufacturing sites, Arkebe Oqubay, a special adviser to Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, said last month. While Africa’s second most-populous nation has a target to earn $1 billion this year from textiles and clothing exports, it shipped only $70 million worth in the nine months through March, according to the Trade Ministry.
Almeda is committed in creating a Hub for excellence in the textile field in Africa in general and Ethiopia in particular.
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