ISLAMABAD: A Chinese iron and steel conglomerate has become the first foreign enterprise to establish its plant in the Rashakai Special Economic Zone under CPEC with a planned investment of $50 million.

The SEZ Committee of Rashakai Special Economic Zone at its meeting on Friday allocated 40 acres to Century Steel Ltd owned by Fuzhou Julitaihe Inter­national Company of China, which owns steel mills in Indonesia, Myanmar, Cambodia and Ethiopia with a net capacity of 3,000 million tonnes of iron and steel products.

The Board of Investment (BoI) in a press release stated the Chinese company has mobilised its engineers and personnel who have started setting up a site office to execute the plant establishment expeditiously.

The Rashakai SEZ comes under the CPEC umbrella and is the first industrial cooperation project between China and Pakistan. The 1,000-acre zone will create 200,000 direct and indirect jobs and is expected to attract Rs347 billion of investment.

Having the capacity to produce 0.25 million tonnes of steel products per annum at the proposed plant in Rasha­kai, the project will consume 45MW of electricity and create job opportunities for 1,000 employees directly or indirectly.

The BoI said 10MW of electricity at the economic zone had already been arranged through 11kV feeder, while work was in progress on the 160MW, 132 kV grid station. Due to its location on the motorway and proximity to the Torkham border and Central Asia, the Rashakai SEZ is expected to be the game-changer for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Published in Dawn, January 16th, 2021