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Business Reporter
STATE-owned Allied Timbers Zimbabwe is looking to team up with private investors to build up its harvesting capacity as it seeks to meet growing demand for timber products.

The company, which owns 10 forest estates mostly in the Manicaland Province will take advantage of its huge resource base to lure investors with financial and technical capacity to enhance viability, chief executive Dr Daniel Sithole said in an interview.

“We have got the biological resource and this has excited some private investors that we are talking with for some BOT (Build, operate, transfer) arrangement,” said Dr Sithole.

“We have two serious foreign investors that have lined up and we will obviously come up with a mechanism of rewarding each other during the process (the tenure of the BOT.”

The increase in housing construction around the country has boosted Allied domestic sales while orders from regional markets, particularly Zambia and Botswana are growing.

Dr Sithole said the BOT arrangement would enable Allied to introduce latest technology that would help the company to increase its utilisation capacity of harvested trees.

Through latest technology, some companies in the world are utilizing between 80 and 90 percent of the trees, giving them more value from. Allied is utilizing only 30 percent.

Dr Sithole said Allied, which has contracted some local companies to complement its production, said the alliances was one of the strategic routes to improve its operations and grow revenues.

Last year, Government promulgated the Joint Ventures Act aimed at promoting major investment across economic sectors. The objectives of the Joint Ventures Act include providing for the implementation of joint venture agreements, establishing governing rules for the public-private procurement process, establishing governing rules for public-private partnerships and supporting major investments across all sectors.

Categories of joint ventures under the JVA include build and transfer, build, lease and transfer, build, own and operate, build, own, operate and transfer, build, transfer and operate, contract, add and operate as well as develop, operate and transfer.

The Act provides a clear legal framework for participation of the private sector in national projects.

Allied was born out of Forestry Commission of Zimbabwe in 2003 and the idea of unbundling the commission was to separate regulatory activities from commercial activities.

The intention was to enable both institutions to effectively pursue their mandates, with funds from the commercial wing supposed to assist in funding regulatory functions. The commercial wing gave rise to Forestry Company of Zimbabwe, later rebranded to Allied Timbers while regulatory activities were reconstituted into Forestry Commission.