Chief Executive Officer, Guinness Nigeria Plc, John Musunga, has again reiterated that the company has no plan to leave the country and is rather looking to increase its capital investments and expanding production capacity.

He added that they are doing this with a recently acquired land just behind their present manufacturing plant in the Ikeja industrial area as well as additional machinery to increase local spirits production having identified huge opportunities that could aid their expansion.

Musunga made this clarification recently when he explained some of the company’s new operational strategies in distributing its products in Nigeria in the face of worsening foreign exchange scarcity and Naira volatility businesses are experiencing in the country.

“We have no intention now, or in the future, to exit from Nigerian market. We are delighted with the opportunities consumers here are giving to our brands. We have a robust research and development (R&D) that will continue to give us what the taste preference, needs, aspirations of our Nigerian consumers are.”

He added that to further demonstrate their intention to remain in the country, they recently assembled water recapture plants in Lagos and Benin that cost millions of dollars and helps in purifying waste water, making it fit for other industrial purposes.

“We have new equipment brought in last week to expand our spirit capacity having identified huge opportunities in our consumer products that our mainstream business here in Nigeria could tap into and expand upon; we’ll commission it next year,” he stated.

Musunga said that the recent announcement made by the company on the marketing of its imported finished products is to enable them concentrate on spirits manufactured locally in Nigeria. A new company would be charged with the importation and distribution of the finished spirit products in Nigeria from April next year.

According to him, the imported spirits represented just six per cent of the company’s yearly turnover but consumed 15 per cent of their FX demands, a situation, he said could not continue seeing as FX is scarce and keeps rising against the Naira.

“When the President announced new policies that resulted in currency devaluation, we were carrying huge foreign exchange exposure and this removed us from a very healthy profit position to making a N19 billion loss.

“By being very tactful of how we move these imported spirits around, it will free us to utilise the foreign exchange earned from our business and the little that we receive from the government to buy raw materials for manufacturing,” he stated.

According to him, they are not moving away from spirits totally but simply focusing on locally made ones. He expressed confidence that the measures taken by the government will bear fruits soon.