A new water bottling plant worth more than $150 million was officially opened in Nadi over the weekend.
Owned by Fiji-born business mogul Hamid Ali, the 18 Degrees Fiji Mineral Water plant is expected to provide employment and boost Fiji’s exports.
During the opening, Mr Ali said there were more opportunities to bring other businesses into Fiji.
“We’ve established ourselves a huge QSR (quick service restaurant) business, that is KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Benihana and various different brands including Island Pokies,” he said.
“We are a diversified group and I’m the chairman and CEO of the group of companies.
“We have investments in Singapore, Malaysia, Netherlands and we also have Morocco and the US. “Me being born in Fiji, I thought after all these years that I’d come back home and start investing.
“We think Fiji is a great place to invest, and that’s why we’ve diversified in all different sectors.”
He said he wanted to bring his other brands to Fiji.
“We’ll soon be bringing KFC, Taco Bell and all the other brands here as well to create jobs for our locals.
“While we have expatriates who will also be coming, but locally, we will hire mainly locals.”
He said they were proud to be relaunching 18 Degrees Fiji Mineral Water.
“What we are going to do is a state-of-the-art factor investing between $150m and $200m in upgrading the machines.
“We’ve already ordered the machinery from Italy and we will be getting the engineers to come and assemble it.”
Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama opened the plant.
