Salalah Mills to set up food hub at Khazaen

@conradprabhu -

Dhofar-based Salalah Mills, the nation’s largest flour mill, plans to set up a flour-based food processing hub at Khazaen Economic City near Barka with an initial investment of RO 12.5 million.

The project, due to come into operation in the third quarter of 2023, is expected to augment Khazaen’s appeal as a destination for, among other activities, food related investments.

Ahmed Abdullah al Rawas, Chairman, said in the Directors’ report that the new investment is in line with Salalah Mills’ strategy to grow its flour-based food processing industrial base. Envisaged in the first phase of its implementation are an industrial bakery and multiple production lines for frozen and semi-baked pastries.

Located at Raysut Industrial City, Salalah Mills has a flour milling capacity of 1500 metric tons (MT) per day, effectively making it the largest miller in the Sultanate of Oman. Complementing this capacity is a complex of silos that can hold up to 161,500 MT of wheat, which is also the largest of its kind in the country. In addition, the company owns three unloading machines at Port of Salalah with a discharge capacity of 1500 MT per hour.

In 2021, group revenues totaled RO 60.1 million, representing a growth of 12.4 per cent from the previous year’s total of RO 53.5 million. Around 52.7 per cent of these revenues came from exports of its flour and wheat-based products to markets in Africa and Asia. Net profit climbed around 9 per cent to RO 4.1 million last year.

In line with its growth strategy, Salalah Mills – which is listed on the Muscat Stock Exchange (MSX) – is also expanding the capacity of its packaging plant to 100 million bags per annum, up from 75 million bags presently, at a cost of RO 3 million. The new capacity will come online before the end of the year. An animal feed line enhancement project became operational in January this year.

With regard to its plans to relocate one of its spaghetti production lines from its wholly owned subsidiary Salalah Macaroni to Ethiopia, the company noted that the move has been postponed due to pandemic-related challenges. The transfer of the plant equipment, as part of a JV arrangement with a leading Ethiopian industrial and trading group, has been delayed to sometime later this year, it stated.