Dangote Sugar Refinery (DSR) Plc has grown its profit after tax for the nine months ended September 30, 2020, by 81 per cent, thereby giving shareholders reason to salivate ahead of the end of the financial year. Net profit stood at N26.629 billion (69.032 million dollars) compared to the N14.703billion (38.115 million dollars) recorded in 2019.
Dangote Sugar refinery last July formally took over Savannah Sugar Company Limited(SSCL) in a bid to boost production capacity and further increase its market share.
The merger of the two firms to become sub-Saharan Africa’s largest sugar refining supported the company’s backward integration plan to revolutionise the sugar sub-sector of the nation’s economy.
Chairman of DSR, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, had said the company would be leveraging SSCL’s sugarcane plantation to enhance its production capacity.
According to him, SSCL has 32,000 hectares of land available for cultivation of sugar cane as well as milling capacity of 50,000 tonnes of sugar per annum and that upon the merger, further investments would be made to increase SSCL land under cultivation.
Dangote had explained that the DSR board considered the merger as fair and reasonable and believed that it would provide strategic opportunities and benefits for the company, employees and other stakeholders as the new company would be operating from the position of increased access to capital and then higher profitability.
Dangote had listed some of the benefits of the merger as being to consolidate the assets, intellectual property rights, operations, and business dealings of the SSCL into the DSR; eliminate cost inefficiencies arising from duplication of resources and processes and improve the efficiency through more focused management of resources and position it as the biggest integrated sugar producer in Nigeria.
Goddy Ogene