The chairperson of the CFM board of directors, Rui Fonseca, cited in Monday's issue of the Maputo daily 'Noticias', said that the dredging of the access channel will allow large ships uninterrupted access to the port.
Speaking of CFM plans for this year, during the annual meeting of his company's Council of Directors, that ended in Beira on Friday, Fonseca said that a further project is to acquire an ocean-going dredge with the capacity of 2.5 million cubic meters and to recover other equipment, all budgeted at 40 million US dollars, to be contributed by the Danish government.
To try and find a permanent solution to the dredging problem in the country's ports, the Mozambican government has created a National Dredging Fund, to be managed by CFM.
Fonseca said that CFM is to add one million US dollars to the three million dollars a year granted by the government. This fund is to be activated before the end of 2007.
Speaking of CFM's financial performance in 2006, he said that preliminary results indicate that the company showed a profit of 8.8 million US dollars.
'One must note that these are still provisional results, because these accounts are yet to be submitted to external audit to include depreciation, currency exchange fluctuations, and other factors. This economic and financial performance is the result of a joint effort by all of us, that involved greater management rigour, increased cost reduction, discipline and a strict control of the budgets made available to each area of activity in the company', said Fonseca.
He noted that in any analysis of the CFM results one must take into account that the company no longer runs the ports of Maputo, Beira, and Nacala, or the central and northern rail systems, where management has been leased out to private consortia. This reduces CFM's capacity to generate revenue and profits.
SOURCE: AIM
