Osinbajo Inaugurates Kimberly-Clark new Huggies Diaper $100m Manufacturing Plant in Ikorodu
Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has inaugurated Kimberly Clark’s new Huggies Diaper Manufacturing Plant in Ikorodu, Lagos State.
The company said it invested over $100m in building a state-of-the-art Huggies diaper manufacturing facility in Odogunyan, Ikorodu, Lagos, with the capacity to create over 1,000 direct and indirect jobs that can grow to 5,000 within 3-5 years of operation.
The factory would also provide the youths in Ikorodu Federal Constituency and indeed Lagos-Nigeria at large opportunities within the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry.
Speaking as a special guest at the event, Vice President Osinbajo said, “This plant, I am told would serve Nigerian consumers with affordable high-quality diapers and I am told it will produce something in the order of about 600 million diapers every year.
“I am also told that with our seven million babies born every year, we are just two million behind the Chinese, so we are really the largest possible market for diapers in the world, coming second only to the Chinese.
“So, I think Kimberly – Clark has chosen a very good place. We are told also that this will provide thousands of jobs and I believe that the first thousand are already in place and we expect a further couple of thousands in the next three years.”
Osinbajo disclosed that for the federal government, “every new manufacturing plant is an important step toward our belief that it is private investment, but local and foreign that must be the pathway to rapid economic growth with jobs and prosperity.”
The Vice President noted that the success of the plant depends greatly on the conscious reliance on the private enterprise and initiative, stressing that it only makes sense that the private sector is given every encouragement to play that role.
He added “And this commitment of the federal government is expressed in the strategic objectives of the plan which include establishing a strong foundation for a diversified economy, investing in critical infrastructure – roads, rails, power, and broadband; enabling human capital development and improving governance and strengthening security.”
According to him, the implementation of the plan is expected to be supported by a range of fiscal monitoring and trade measures including more intentionally promoting productivity and value addition.
Osinbajo announced that the central thought behind the plan is that we must improve productivity and value addition.
