[Ferro-Alloys.com] Zimbabwe is now moving rapidly towards becoming one of the top major heavy industrial centres in Africa and the future African Continental Free Trade Area as it converts its vast range of mineral wealth into the materials that manufacturers and others use to make the final products.

Already the new giant steelworks of Dinson Iron and Steel Company, the local subsidiary of Tsingshan Holdings of China, at Manhize is in production and has moved beyond pig iron and steel billets to steel bar, with other materials, such as sheet steels, in the pipeline and the specialist stainless steels coming in future phases.

Now a second base metallurgical industrial centre, this time by Xintai, the local subsidiary of Xinganglian (Shanxi) Holdings of China, is rising near Beitbridge with the Palm River Energy Metallurgical Economic Zone that will be centred on another major stainless steel production investment.

These two giant investments are being fed by the ferrochrome smelters and nickel processing that is already in place and which are being expanded, not least by another ferrochrome smelter in the Palm River complex. Both steel complexes have their coking plants, Dinson’s at Hwange and Xintai’s at Palm River.

Zimbabwe is well positioned to be a high-end steel production centre having large deposits of iron ore, which can be mined and processed locally but which it is quite uneconomic to export as ore from a landlocked country near the bottom end of a continent. There are also the necessary deposits of reasonable quality coal suitable for coking, the second most important ingredient in the steel mix.

The stress on stainless steels comes because up to 20 percent of standard stainless steels is chrome and up to 11 percent is nickel. Zimbabwe has both in good quantities and already these minerals have to be exported as metal, that is ferrochrome and nickel metal. These happen to be the form of these raw materials that a stainless steel producer wants, so the bars can soon be going to local steel producers.

There is a policy of value addition, which is why there is so much pressure on not exporting ores but at least having partial processing or better done in Zimbabwe. This is also sensible from the point of view of those wanting to export from a landlocked country far away, when you want a product that is easy to handle and has maximum value for its bulk. Bars of metal have these attributes while a truck or wagon of crushed ore is neither easy to handle and is expensive to transport when we look at costs per unit of value.

It makes even more sense, if the rest of the raw materials are on hand, as they are in Zimbabwe, for the local processing and value addition to move up to the level of steels and stainless steels so that transport and other costs of each dollar of value are lower still.

More specialist stainless steels include a couple of percent of molybdenum in addition to the chrome and nickel and traces of other elements that are normally found with iron ore and so are no problem to add. Africa is not really on the world’s molybdenum production map, but Zimbabwe has some deposits.

A modest deposit was confirmed near Chipinge at the end of the 1980s, not large enough for a viable commercial investment when all that was wanted was train loads of ore to ship to a port, but could quite easily be very useful when only modest quantities are needed at local stainless steel smelters. It would seem sensible for a more thorough geological investigation of other potential deposits.

While Zimbabwe is unlikely to ever have the sort of manufacturing and construction sectors that can use the quantities of steel we are looking at producing, this huge supply of primary products does open up opportunities for the heavy metal production that we have been lacking, with a reasonable chunk of the processed steel exported as products, rather than materials.

Zimbabwean industry has tended to concentrate on agro-processing, sensible and important considering the farming pillar of our economy, and on some of the lighter end of consumer products. Metal manufacturers have been importing their materials, which has limited opportunities, a limit that soon disappears. The downstream industries open a vast range of opportunities for many companies, not all of which have to be giant concerns.

The other major advance that we are now looking at is the commercial natural gas drilling in the Muzarabani area, providing both energy and a feedstock for chemical industries. Other processing of minerals for export and for fertilisers has seen other elements needed in a chemical industrial base coming through.

We admit one major problem is developing heavy industry has been the energy deficiency in Zimbabwe. The two giant investors at Manhize and Beitbridge saw this from the beginning and both are building their own power stations to supply their own needs and to sell any surplus into the grid. Xintai has gone further and plans a major power station that will go far further than its own requirements and be an energy investment. Since Zesa’s distribution arm can buy just about anything that anyone can generate in Zimbabwe this is a safe bet.

Invictus, the gas explore, has also seen the profitable possibilities of investment into gas fed power stations and has these lined up for the early parts of its own investment programme.

The reasons for the billions of US dollars of investment being made in Zimbabwe is not just because the stuff people want to mine is here. Other countries have that. But the Second Republic has pushed hard for a pro-businesses investment environment, including the special economic zones that are required and the openness to energy investment as investors build power stations. The fact that President Mnangagwa is more than willing to turn up at groundbreaking and commissioning ceremonies shows the sort of support that Government wants to give.

At the same time, we are starting to reap our major investments in education. An investor moving into Zimbabwe can quickly find people who can be rapidly trained to operate their businesses and factories, right from the lowest labourers to the top technical people. This makes it much easier to open a new investment, since almost all the foreign workers needed will be trainers, rather than permanent staff.

We are now at one of the most exciting times for Zimbabwe’s economic progress, as we add the heavy metallurgical column to our existing agro-industrial column and so move forward rapidly to becoming a major industrial giant.

Herald  February 26, 2025

• [Editor:tianyawei]