Gweru-based Zimbabwe Glass Industries (Zimglass) is scheduled to resume operations in April 2012 after the company shut down last September, leaving 472 permanent employees and 100 contract workers stranded. Zimglass had battled to secure funds to re-start operations caused by the liquidity crunch damaging the country's economy. Zimglass' parent company, The Industrial Development Corporation, has, however, succeeded in courting investors to inject USD 7M into the company to refurbish its furnaces. According to Jacob Dube, the company's managing director, production will start up in April after the commissioning of the furnaces. The major cause of the delay was, he added, due to lack of capital. "It must be remembered that at the introduction of the multicurrency regime we were all reduced to zero. It took us more than 15 months to raise the required finance to be able to place orders with the suppliers. It was a most debilitating period of our project implementation. It is common cause that many companies have suffered a great deal because of this situation in the country that has resulted in several companies failing to resume operations," Dube said. The re-commissioning of the plant will result in Zimglass operating at full capacity. Dube dismissed reports saying that Zimglass had lost contracts from some of its clients, especially Delta Beverages, which is said to have dumped the glass manufacturer for South African suppliers. "Fortunately we have inquiries from all over the world, especially regional, for the supply of bottles. We are therefore not aware of any of our customers who have dumped us in favour of South African companies." "What is true, though, is that our customers had to remain in business while we were offline and they therefore had to source their requirements from elsewhere, but that does mean that they dumped Zimglass. We have indeed retained all our customers and they are all anxiously waiting for the resumption of supplies from us as soon as the plant is commissioned," Dube explained.
