With a planned investment of $50 million, a Chinese iron and steel conglomerate has become the first foreign enterprise to develop its plant in the Rashakai Special Economic Zone under CPEC.
At its meeting on Friday, the SEZ Committee of the Special Economic Zone of Rashakai allocated 40 acres to Century Steel Ltd, owned by Fuzhou Julitaihe International Company of China, which operates steel mills with a total capacity of 3,000 million tonnes of iron and steel products in Indonesia, Myanmar, Cambodia and Ethiopia.
In a press release, the Board of Investment (BoI) reported that the Chinese company has mobilized its engineers and workers who have begun setting up a site office to enforce the plant establishment expeditiously.
The Rashakai SEZ falls under the umbrella of the CPEC and is the first China-Pakistan industrial cooperation project. The 1,000-acre zone will generate 200,000 direct and indirect jobs and is estimated to attract investment of Rs347 billion.
Having the capacity to manufacture 0.25 million tonnes of steel products annually at the planned Rashakai site, the project would consume 45 MW of electricity and directly or indirectly generate work opportunities for 1,000 employees.
The BoI reported that 10MW of electricity had already been arranged via an 11kV feeder in the economic region, while work on the 160MW, 132 kV grid station was in progress. Rashakai SEZ is expected to be the game-changer for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa due to its location on the motorway and proximity to the Torkham border and Central Asia.
