eBusiness Weekly
Martin Kadzere
Portuguese construction company Mota-Engil has won a bid to construct a multi-million dollar Radisson Blu Hotel in the east of Harare’s Central Business District, officials said.
Mota-Engil will soon sign the engineering, procurement and construction contract with project promoters led by local businessman Farai Jere, he told Business Weekly.
Rezidor Hotels Group are partners with Jere’s Streamwalk Investments in the project that will probably be the largest construction project to be undertaken in the capital in recent years.
The project was mooted around 2013.
Currently the 11th largest hotel group in the world, RHG is made up of eight hotel brands with more than 1 400 hotels in operation and under various stages of development.
It has around 18 000 hotel rooms and is looking to more than double this by adding 20 000.
“We will be signing the ECP contract with Mota-Engil very soon,” Jere said.
“Their team from Portugal was here in December (last year) with the (proposed designs) of the hotel.”
An official at Mota-Engil confirmed winning the contract but could not shed more light.
“We can confirm that we have won the contract and we are expecting to sign necessary agreements very soon,” said the official who requested not to be named.
Sources said the civil works on the site are expected to start in the next six months.
A local audit and advisory company was also finalising commercial and financial due diligence.
Negotiations with financiers were also ongoing with The African Export-Import Bank and ABSA of South Africa being among the financial institutions that have been engaged.
Spreading wings
While the Mota-Engil group is based in Portugal, the company was originally founded in Angola in 1946. Angola, a Portuguese speaking country accounted for more than half of Mota-Engil Africa sales last year. In Zimbabwe, the group has a contract mining agreement with Hwange Colliery Company Limited where it is doing the bulk of production.
Mota-Engil currently has a three-billion euro backlog Africa where it has a strong presence in Angola.
Last year, the company signed a joint venture with Nigeria’s Shoreline Group, an independent Nigeria oil producer to undertake projects in Nigeria worth as much as $1,8 billion.
In Mozambique, another Portuguese speaking country, Mota-Engil announced in 2017 it had won a contract worth 445 million euro to provide mining services including drilling, explosives supply, cargo and transport of waste and coal in the mining project for coal extraction at Moatize, where the contract’s adjudicator, Vale, is a concessionaire.
Mota-Engil also played an integral part in the development of the Nacala Corridor between 2012 and 2014, working on two sections of the 900-kilometre line in Malawi.
One section involved the construction and rehabilitation of an existing 100-kilometre stretch of railroad, while the second project entailed building of a new 145-kilometre line between Kachaso on the Malawi-Mozambique border and Nkaya Junction in the district of Balaka, Malawi.
Mota-Engil also completed rehabilitation and expansion work on the Sena Railroad in 2016.
Now in operation, the 575-kilometre train-line connects Moatize to the Port of Beira in the south of Mozambique and has capacity to transport six million tonnes of coal a year.
Infrastructure delivery
Mota-Engil Africa has been delivering crucial infrastructure and services across a range of sectors since it began operations in Angola more than 70 years ago. With a strong 12 600-strong workforce, Mota-Engil is spread over 16 countries from east to south to west in the sub-Sahara region in Angola Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya.
On the West African side, the company is present in the Ivory Coast, Guinea, Conakry, Cameroon, and most recently it opened up an office in Nigeria. It is also looking at tendering in Senegal and Ghana, and seek to potentially establish permanent bases, though if it is the right project we will act across the whole continent.
This presence culminates in a company, which in 2017 turned over nearly $1 billion and currently has an order book worth $2,9 billion. The company’s revenue for 2017’s revenue was up 21 percent or $171,54 million higher than in the previous year.
