29 Jun 2024

Botswana Ash mine remains the leading supplier of Soda Ash and related food grades salts in Africa.
Addressing a press conference on the sidelines of the mine media tour recently, Botash managing director, Mr Kangangwane Phatshwane said Botash also remained the leading supplier of natural sodium products across Southern Africa despite competition from Kenya and Tanzania where there were also salts deposits.
To date, he said they were exporting over 90 per cent of their soda ash core products and food grades salts to South Africa while the remaining percentage was sold in Botswana and to other countries such as Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe, among others.
He said they also had a sole client, SASOL in South Africa, which took most of the export. He explained that soda ash was needed mostly in production of glass and related products.
“Annually, we produce over the 300 tonnes of food grades salts, 280 tonnes of soda ash of which 98 per cent goes to South Africa glass industry and 160 tonnes of chemical salts being taken to Sasol,” he said.
Mr Phatshwane said their business was anchored on a set of values, which included accountability, safety, good customer relations and excellent output integrity as well as working together united towards a common goal, hence they remained the supplier of choice to their markets.
Over the years, he said the mining industry had been faced with challenges of uncertainty of markets and conflicts across world from wars in the Middle East and Ukraine hence they were prompted to adopt new strategies for sustainability.
“In our case, we have developed a five-year strategy for the period of 2022-2027 and to date, we have introduced three new products which we are working on introducing into the market when the time is right,” he said.
The three products to introduce, he said included potassium sulphate known as Bicarbonate of Soda used in production of animal feeds and in industries as well as Potassium sulphate, a premium fertiliser for plants nutrients, which by far was not manufactured anywhere else in Africa except from Eretria hence their desire to evade the vast market.

The other product, he added would be sodium sulphate used in manufacturing of detergents.
He explained that introducing new products would enable the company to always have something in their baskets to offer in the market for continuity, sustainability and diversification of products.
In addition, he said over the year, the company had been profitable and owing to their goods’ performance in the market, they were confident to have doubled their profits by 2027.
Meanwhile, he said their resource evaluation report showed that the mine could run until 2050. ends