Opportunities for investment in Mozambique’s underdeveloped construction industry

Mozambique’s real estate sector has substantial investment opportunities. However, current security concerns in the Cabo Delgado province affect the country’s risk profile.

RESEARCH into Mozambique’s construction industry identifies the sector as underdeveloped compared to global standards. The US Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration (ITA) report released earlier this year stated while construction has been a backbone to Mozambique’s economic growth and attracted significant megaprojects, there is room for growth. Historically work was conducted by Portuguese companies. Over the past decade, Chinese companies have grown their market share. Other competitors include entities from Brazil, South Africa and Turkey.

There are currently 16 construction companies on the radar screen, ten of which have operations in Maputo and two in Matola. Mota-Engil Mozambique is designing the $1.14 billion Tete-to-Macuse Railway project, whilst the $365 million Mozambique liquefied national gas (LNG) offloading facility project is in limbo. That initiative forms part of Total’s $20 billion LNG plant initiative in Cabo Delgado that was suspended indefinitely in April 2021 following terrorist activities in the region.

The Penta-Ocean Construction Toa Corporation Joint Venture continues its $300 million container terminal expansion in Mozambique’s third-largest port Nacala.

There are two data centre projects on the drawing board with investments totalling $50 million. The first is the Raxio Data Centre and the second wingu.africa data centre. Raxio builds and operates a network of tier three carrier-neutral data centres (a location with redundant and dual-powered servers, storage, network links and other information technology components) and currently has projects under construction or consideration in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ghana, Tanzania and Rwanda as well as Mozambique. wingu.africa is East Africa’s first carrier and cloud-neutral data centre group.

For more information on these and other projects in Mozambique, please contact us here.