MeTL Group: Tanzania’s Largest Home-Grown Company

Mohammed Dewji, CEO of MeTL Group, Tanzania’s largest home-grown company, has personally pledged to create 100,000 new jobs within the next four years. He talks about his faith in the potential of Tanzania and its people.

“If you look at the growth of the country and our growth, we were a mere trading house that was just trading soft commodities and today we are still the largest trading house and when I say trading I mean imports and exports so I import everything, soft commodities, sugar, rice, fertilisers, etc. Everything from tomato paste to bubble-gum, to tractors to motorcycles, air conditioners… over 100 products. We export cocoa, coffee, sesame seeds, yellow gram, cotton, anything and everything that you find in this country. Then we progressed into manufacturing. So when socialism fell off, people started putting in structures and I think it was the third phase government that started saying that we needed more value addition and job creation. Today we have over 31 industries, we had the largest edible oil refinery in Africa at one point, manufacturing cooking fat and margarine, we have grain milling, wheat milling, maize milling, rice milling, plastics, PET, water, juices, carbonated drinks… We have managed to corner the Unilevers and the Procter & Gambles of this world in our country. We manufacture bicycles and we do textiles, we do spinning, weaving processing, dying, printing… we are now going into knitting and garmenting. We produce over one hundred million metres of cloth from Tanzanian cotton; that is one hundred thousand kilometres of cloth, which is two times the circumference of the world! There is a lot of manufacturing here. Then we integrated into agriculture, which everybody thought was going to be a challenge. We produce 40% of sisal, we grow cashews, not only do we grow cashews and export raw cashews but our manufacturing arm processes cashews into cashew kernels which we export 99% of to the US. We are also into tea. The key for MeTL has been the distribution. We have over 100 outlets country wide, we have ICT infrastructure, warehousing, etc., to be able to reach the hinterland of this country. When a farmer wants to sell us anything we give him money and with that money he wants to buy fast moving consumer goods, which in turn goes into petroleum, insurance, mobile telephoning and infrastructure projects. The growth has been the reflection of the growth of the country. We have a President now that says he wants to support the manufacturing sector. Why not? Today sugar is in a deficit, it’s a quarter of a million dollar investment, you have agriculture and with that you can create jobs. I am very bullish and very positive and that is why we have a vision that this is one of the sectors that we want to invest in and where we are going to bring in value but I have always been an impact investor, before even the phrase impact investing was out, because I always believed that yes I need to make money and a return but I would choose where I can create more jobs and get a return over where I can just have an easy ride. Sometimes I even compromise on my return a little bit for creating jobs. That is my commitment to the President and I hope I will be able to succeed”, says Mohammed Dewji.