Top construction contractor insists govt. should give priority for local direct investments

From left: RN Constructions ((Pvt.) Ltd Corporate General Manager Ajith Weniwella, Group Director Nishantha EdirisingheGroup Chairman/Managing Director Rowan Edirisinghe, Group General Manager Bandula Wijesinghe and General Manager- Projects, Srilal Fernando
Pic by Pradeep Dilrukshana

By Zahara Zuhair
RN Constructions (Pvt.) Ltd, a leading construction contractor in industrial developments in Sri Lanka stressing that the government should give priority to local direct investments, also expressed its displeasure over the local regulatory environment for local manufacturers.
“I’m not blaming any government. We don’t belong to any political party, but what we say is any Sri Lankan government should give value for its industrialists,” RN Group Managing Director Ruwan Edirisinghe said. 
“We are facing a lot of problems now, including taxation problems. My main product is steel building. Steel building comes through FTA from India at zero duty, but unfortunately in the Sri Lankan market, when we buy steel to manufacture steel building, it has 15-25 percent duty, and we have to compete with zero duty products coming to Sri Lanka from the world’s biggest countries,” he said. 
Talking about their plans for he told Mirror Business that they will be investing beyond Rs.10 billion this year. 
“We will improve all available companies, and we will be going into property development, food manufacturing and agriculture; those are our areas for this year. Next year, we will be going into energy sector, but not yet finalized,” he said.
“We are expecting to further improve our manufacturing capacity and at least gain a reasonable market share in the South Asian region. We will be going in to areas like high-rise building construction, which we have done a few already,” he said.
In 2015, he said that they were able to secure very large housing development projects in Slave Island, Colombo, and completed the SAITM hospital in Malabe in 2014, which has more than 1,000 beds, 123 luxury rooms and six operation theatres.
Meanwhile, responding to a query about the shortage of skilled labours in the construction industry, he said that automation and mechanisation were the solutions to address this issue.
“In our company we don’t have that issue at a very high level. Most of the workers working in our company continuously work for longer years, so we have permanent people working with us. So we are for automation and manufacturing to improve work quality. Not limiting to industrial developments, today RN is into construction of hotel projects, hospitals, apartments, housing projects, office buildings, supermarkets, commercial buildings, telecommunication projects, road and bridge construction, etc.
Some of the clients of RN Group include; Nestlé Lanka, Shangri-La Hotels Group, John Keells Holdings, Brandix Lanka, MAS Holdings etc. 
RN has a workforce over 2000 employees, including about 300 technical staff and over 350 units of machinery, equipments and vehicle fleet to cater for its in house demand.
Their achievements include, ICTAD Construction Safety Award in 2008 for the Serendib Warehouse building project, CEDA Construction Excellence Award and Green Excellence Award in 2015 for warehouse building for Nestle Lanka in Pannala and the CEDA Construction Excellence Awards 2016 for the bottling plant for Distilleries Company of Sri Lanka (DCSL) in Seeduwa.