Population growth, infrastructure investment and rising incomes are driving the growth of Roofings, Uganda’s largest manufacturer of steel products.
Climb up high in Kampala and you will find yourself looking out across a sea of iron roofs. Zoom in, and you can see them being made. Steel coils, like enormous rolls of tape, arrive on trucks at the factory of Roofings Group in Namanve, on the edge of town.
There they are cleaned with acid and rolled to the right thickness – “like how you roll a chapati”, says an engineer – before being smoothed, trimmed, galvanised, colour-coated and corrugated.
Elsewhere in the factory, glowing hot billets are formed into long reinforcing bars, which poke from the concrete walls of half-completed buildings all over the city. Another part of the complex makes wire.
The story of Roofings, Uganda’s largest manufacturer of steel products, shows how a construction boom can generate manufacturing growth. The company was founded in 1994 by Sikander Lalani, a Ugandan Asian entrepreneur who trained as a histopathologist before leaving medicine for business.
In the 1970s he dealt in electronics and tyres in neighbouring Rwanda, and later started making roofing materials there. He relocated to Uganda after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, founding Roofings with a $2m investment and 60 employees. Today the company, which is still family-owned, boasts 1,850 permanent employees.
The original plant in Lubowa, just outside Kampala, has now been supplemented by the $180m rolling mill complex at the Kampala Industrial and Business Park in Namanve, where Roofings was the first business to start operations.
The latter project attracted funding from the International Finance Corporation, the private sector lending arm of the World Bank, as well as a 10% equity stake from the Japanese steel firms Yodogawa Steel Works and Fujiden International. That relationship helped with technology transfer.
“[The Japanese firms] have supplied us with equipment,” says Stuart Mwesigwa, business development manager at Roofings. “They are the ones who have trained our people in everything… At one time we had about 10 of them here, then we reduced to five, then two, then one. Now we don’t have any Japanese person around, because we have grasped the way they do things.”
