ROOFINGS GROUP is a Uganda-based manufacturing company established in 1994, situated about 6km south of Kampala city centre on Plot 126 Entebbe Road, Lubowa, occupying a 39-acre expanse of land, and is the leading producer of quality steel products in Uganda, with a good market reach across the East African region.

Roofings Limited was the first of the three Roofings Group subsidiary companies to be established.

The New Times’ Sarah Kwihangana had a chat with Stuart Jason Mwesigwa, the Group Business Development Officer, and Martin Kyeyune, Finance and Economic Advisor on the plans they have for the Rwanda market.

Excerpts:

What are the products Roofings Ltd brings to the Rwandan market?

We have a wide range of products, all on the Rwandan market through our local agents. We manufacture quality steel construction material and plastics including; iron sheets, nails, hollow sections, TMT bar products, binding, razor barbed wires, chain links, flat sheets, plates as well as PVCs for water collection and transmission from one point to another, among other products. 

With support from our customers in the region, we have managed to expand to Namanve where we ventured into backward integration and have invested over 142 million dollars into the facility which is a three-phase entity and are doing wire galvanising, that is raw material for fencing products; that is the chain links, barbed and razor wire. Then, we have phase two that entails steel rolling where we melt scrap and billets imported from South Africa to make thermal mechanically treated bars in various sizes. 

The third phase is the backward integration where we are looking at hot rod coils that we import from Japan and South Africa; then we reduce them to the thickness of what we want to do, and galvanise them for the raw material that makes sheets.

These can be sold either in raw form or you can go ahead to do pre-painting where you get color coated coils to make colored sheets; so from that we can make different profiles of sheets; super echo sheets, super tiles and echo tiles. (For more information clients can visit www.roofingsgroup.com).

Do you have a local shop for the Rwandan market?

Roofings Group doesn’t have a shop in Rwanda at the moment but we have various agents across the country that we have been dealing with over the years. 

What is so unique about your products and has the public appreciated them?

We are using Japanese technology to manufacture our products and our quality is not compromised. It’s the quality aspect of our products which has been maintained over the years that markets like Rwanda have managed to appreciate and support us. 

Any prospects of opening a manufacturing plant in Rwanda in the near future?

We want to venture into expansion by extending our interests to Rwanda and start manufacturing locally. We are currently in discussions with Rwanda Development Board. We have already registered our company and have secured land at the Kigali Special Economic Zone. We hope to start the construction works by 2015. 

On completion, our agents will be saved time and transport costs. It will also make it easy to  distribute our products to neighbouring countries like Congo.

We expect to help  widen Rwanda’s tax base and skills development through training opportunities for both our Rwandan employees and interns.