African Bamboo PLC is a forestry, wood and bio-energy company established in the Netherlands and Ethiopia in January 2012. African Bamboo PLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Fortune Enterprise PLC, a privately owned company engaged in wood and metal furniture manufacturing in Addis Ababa since 1961.
The furniture industry in Ethiopia is composed of a large number of small- scale and cottage type furniture making workshops and a few relatively large furniture factories. Fortune Enterprise PLC is one of the largest best organized and equipped factories in the country. Today the company has over 150 permanent employees, and reached an annual turnover of Eur 3 million in 2010.
For the manufacturing of furniture, Fortune Enterprise PLC mainly works with traditional woods like teak, pine and some local species. However the- se traditional woods are a scarcity in Ethiopia as the country suffers severe deforestation. Ethiopia’s forests are falling from 15 Mio ha (1990) to 12.3 Mio ha in 2010 with an annual depletion rate of 140,000 ha per year.
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