Habesha Cement (HC) SC awarded the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) tender for its cement factory to Northern Heavy Machinery Industries Shenyang Co Ltd (NHI), a Chinese engineering company, on Wednesday, September 1, 2010.

A letter of intent was sent to NHI on Wednesday, September 1, 2010, for further negotiation of the contract. Specific matters that were addressed in the tender document, like the remedy in case of delay of the completion of the work, are now to be included in the contract.

“Now we are in the process of preparing the draft for the contract to be signed and we expect to send it to NHI within a week,” Mesfin Abi, general manager of HC said, who expects to have the contract signed at the end of the month, told Fortune.

HC expects to take a loan, to the amount of 70 per cent of the whole project, from the Development Bank of Ethiopia (DBE) and cover the remaining 30 per cent itself.

“Since this [cement production] is one of the areas of priority of the government, we expect the loan figure to increase to 90 per cent,” Mesfin said.