Chinese company Punai, which produces refractory materials, is renovating one of Magnohrom’s production facilities in Kraljevo.
This factory used to produce refractory bricks and was built in the late 1980s. Following Magnohrom shutting down in the 1990s, three factories that the company owned declared bankruptcy and the company was subsequently bought by the Belgrade-based company Malbex in 2018. However, Malbex failed to launch production and the factory was sold to Punai in 2021, which immediately started reconstructing the facilities and installing state-of-the-art machinery and equipment.
“Our corporation supplies around 70 steel mills worldwide with refractory materials, and since there is already such a factory in Serbia, we decided to invest in it. In the first phase, we invested around EUR 7 million. The facility will open on June 6 this year and we are counting on an initial annual production of 30,000 tonnes. We will continue investing and the next investment will be around EUR 3 million more in order to reach the planned annual production volume of 50,000 tonnes of bricks. The facility will be the state-of-the-art and one of the best of its kind in Europe in this industry segment,” said Liu Lianbing, the vice president of the Chinese corporation.
The Mayor of Kraljevo, Predrag Terzic said that the factory will employ around 100 workers in the initial stage. He also noted that the local government spent a considerable amount of money to reconstruct the infrastructure on-site, including building a northern bypass road.
(Politika, 09.02.2023)
https://www.politika.rs/sr/clanak/536727/fabrika-kraljevo
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