INVESTING IN MOZAMBIQUE NO LONGER A RISK

Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi on Sunday assured Chinese business people that investing in Mozambique nowadays is no longer a risk.Speaking at the Mozambique-China Business Forum in Beijing, Nyusi said that today Mozambique imports from China grain, automobiles, petroleum, cement, machinery – and in some cases Chinese companies opt to assemble their goods in Mozambique.China, he stressed, has become one of the major investors in Mozambique. From 2013 to the first half of this year 149 Chinese investment projects were approved for a total of 751 million US dollars of foreign direct investment, and capable of creating about 20,000 jobs.
Cooperation between the two countries is now a reality, declared Nyusi. “Nobody can knock down a tree that has been planted with love”, he said. “It sets down roots. The tree planted with love is the true friendship between Mozambique and China”.
About 350 business people attended the event, of whom only 39 were Mozambicans, part of the delegation Nyusi has brought to the Third Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), which begins on Monday.  Mozambique, Nyusi said, has not come to Beijing “as just another country participating in FOCAC. We came to offer and to prove opportunities so that, together with Chinese and African brothers, we can speed up the development of Mozambique”.
In Mozambican tourism, agriculture, agro-industry, mining, energy and infrastructures, China is always present. “China is the largest investor in the hotel industry and is also in aquaculture and fisheries where the volumes of production have been growing every year”.

He declared that Mozambique is known internationally for producing the best prawns in the world. In 2017, it exported 5,800 tonnes of prawns and 4,900 tonnes of assorted fish, including tuna. “We have Japanese, South Korean, Greek, French, Spanish and South African companies operating in fishing or aquaculture, in partnership with Mozambican companies”, the President said. Before the opening of the Forum, Nyusi received representatives of 11 Chinese companies, including some who are already working in Mozambique and others who want to begin operations in the country. They included the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC), which is building the suspension bridge over the Bay of Maputo. Mozambican public companies and institutions on Sunday signed six memorandums of understanding with Chinese partners.Thus the country’s largest commercial bank, the Millennium-BIM, reached an understanding with Fosun International, a Chinese investment and asset management company, and the publicly owned mobile phone company M-Cel signed a memorandum with one of the leading Chinese telecommunications companies, Huawei.The Mozambican government’s Investment and Export Promotion Agency (APIEX) signed an understanding to promote industrial parks in Mozambique, and the National Roads Administration (ANE) signed three memorandums. Lourenco Sambo, the general manager of APIEX, said that 20 proposals for memorandums of understanding had been presented, but for “technical reasons” only six were signed.He added that participation at the Forum exceeded expectations. The Mozambican organisers initially believed that only 90 Chinese companies would accept the invitation, but on the day over 300 showed up.