Produce Buying Company to export sheabutter

Accra, Sep 3, GNA - Produce Buying Company (PBC) Limited is investing in a 10-million dollar facility to enable its subsidiary company, PBC Shea Limited, process sheanuts into butter for export to Brazil by the end of 2010.

The company has finalised arrangements with the Brazilian authorities to enable PBC feed into its markets, where increased demand for shea butter for the food, cosmetics and chemical industries exists.

Mr. Kojo Atta-Krah, Managing Director of PBC Limited, told the Ghana News Agency on Friday in an interview at the end of the launch of the company's 10th Anniversary in Accra.

The event was under the theme: 93Maintaining the Leadership Role of PBC Limited in Cocoa and Shea nut Business."

Mr. Atta-Krah said the company anticipated making lots of earnings in the sheanut sector to enable management retire the entire shea nut facility in five years time.

On the cocoa sector, he said with the right application of farm inputs, he said correct husbandry practices and proper care for the cocoa tree, farmers should be able to double their present output.

Mr. Atta-Krah said 93The present output we are getting from the average farmer is not enough. We need to at least get double the output we are getting from existing farms".

He said concentration on the productivity of land for cultivation of cocoa was worth the effort than anxiety over acreages of land.

Earlier, Mr. Atta-Krah said the company's asset growth appreciated from the GHC4.6 million in 2000, when it got listed on the Ghana Stock Exchange, to more than GHc49 million in 2010.

He said that the company was expecting to hit GHC10 million, as net profit, by the end of the financial year in September.

Dr. John Frank Abu, Board Chairman of PBC Limited, announced that the company had developed a three-year medium term corporate plan intended to grow and develop the company to greater heights, which includes increasing purchases from the current 37 per cent to 43 per cent of the internal cocoa market.

Purchasing and processing up to 40,000 tonnes of sheanuts by the end of the plan period, construction of about 70 sheds and depots and to renovate 60 out of the existing storage facilities, were other plans.

The rest include prompt, efficient and cost-effective evacuation and handing over of cocoa purchased to gain a good seed fund recycling rate and to haul 97 per cent of cocoa purchased at the primary level and up to 50 per cent of purchases at secondary level to generate freight earnings.