DANUBE Building Materials has announced plans to penetrate into the Africa market and strengthen its presence in the Middle East through dealer and franchise networks.

This follows the opening of the first Danube Buildmart branch in India, which marked the leading company’s 22nd global store. Specifically, the company revealed that it is expanding into to Qatar and other parts of Saudi Arabia and Oman, as well as in China, where it currently has one of its major manufacturing plants.
Initially established as a building materials supplier, Danube transformed into a one-stop shop concept called Danube Buildmart in 2009, offering products from a host of reputed vendors as well as expert product and design advice under a single roof. Today, there are a total of nine Danube Buildmart stores in operation, which the company hopes to grow to 16 branches by 2010 through a Dh200 million ($54.5 million) expansion plan it has embarked on since the second quarter of this year.
Including its non-Buildmart stores, the company has a total of 22 global retail facilities – 16 in the UAE, two in Oman, one each in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and two in India.
The company has also invested Dh50 million ($13.6 million) in a new 1.3-million-sq-ft manufacturing facility in TechnoPark, which will be functional by early next year.
“With the global economy approaching recovery phase and investors starting to regain confidence in the regional market as a result of massive government actions to revive the construction and real estate industries, we are expecting the demand for building materials in the Middle East and Africa to witness a significant increase this year,” said Rizwan Sajan, chairman, Danube Building Materials.
“We have already made massive investments toward additional manufacturing hubs to boost our production and sufficiently address the expected rise in demand, and now our focus is to establish highly convenient Danube Buildmart stores in the most strategic locations within our target regions,” he said.
Danube recently also launched a Dh15-million ($4 million) Danube Buildmart in Ibn Battuta Mall, Dubai, thereby marking its third retail branch to be based within a mall, which is a new concept pioneered by the company.