Production on Hold at Pacific Cement Limited

Construction has slowed down for over a month with some projects on hold after Pacific Cement Limited’s mill broke down.

Fiji Sun was at the Lami factory yesterday where workers confirmed the concern, and attributed the challenge to an old transformer that had given up.

A new transformer is expected to arrive this week.

Production crew have since been relegated to maintenance work.

Company chief executive officer Bobby Maharaj was not available for comment, and did not respond to queries from this newspaper, when this edition went to print.

Fijian Holdings Limited Group chief executive officer Jaoji Koroi was also not available for comment last night.

Pacific Cement is owned by Fijian Holdings Limited (51 per cent) and Vinod Patel Group (47 per cent), while the rest of the shares are owned by the public. The plant was established in the 1950s.

Meanwhile, Tengy Cement Pte Ltd, which is a stone-throw from Pacific Cement’s Lami plant, is raking in orders, as trucks queued up along the dusty road to the mill yesterday. Tengy also has a plant in Lautoka. The company did not comment when this newspaper visited the mill.

Basic Industries, the holding company for Standard Concrete and Humes Industries, is a subsidiary of Fijian Holdings.

It’s chief executive officer, Ritesh Dass, said the company was “working diligently to restore supply and alternate suppliers”.

“We expect supply to resume by the end of the month,” Mr Dass said.

“Pacific Cement still had stock after the transformer failure; we continued to get reserve stock.

“We are mitigating against the outage at the moment, as projects are on hold.”

Fiji Sun received public concern over the quality of “Chinese cement”.

However, Mr Dass said Basic Industries stood by the quality of cement supplied by Tengy.

“We believe in data, and we’ve had our analysis for their Suva plant.”

Feedback: frederica.elbourne@fijisun.com.fj