Financial Times

Locally-made tea colour separator
Local engineers have developed a tea colour separator, a key piece of machinery used in tea manufacture, for the Ceylon tea industry that is expected to be much cheaper than imported models and is now being offered for commercial production.

The Moratuwa University has built a scaled down working model that has drawn the interest of some of the island’s engineering firms who are bidding to manufacture and market the machine.

“We have built a prototype now,” declared Malin Goonetileke, secretary general of the Planters’ Association (PA). “It is not a full size working model but it works efficiently.”

Goonetileke said the machine could be sold not only to factories making tea but also to buyers and exporters from whom there is demand as they need to screen their teas.

Tea factories now spend Rs 10-13 million on each imported colour separator, used to separate black tea from other colours. The machines are now mainly imported from Japan. Also, recent government tax changes have raised costs further for tea factories as they are unable to claim the VAT (Value Added Tax) input.

Anil Cooke, vice president of Asia Siyaka Commodities and a member of the tea cluster formed under the USAID funded The Competitiveness Initiative, said the tea colour separator was one initiative the industry is collaborating closely on.

“During the talks in the cluster we realized there was not enough interaction between industry and university,” Cooke said. “We developed a dialogue with the Moratuwa University and we found that Sri Lanka has the ability to develop one of the most expensive machines used in tea manufacture – an average tea colour separator costs about $100,000 – 150,000 to import.”
The tea cluster got together with the University of Moratuwa and invested in research and development within the university.

“This initiative has now been taken on by the PA and CTTA (Ceylon Tea Traders’ Association),” Cooke said. The locally made machine would be offered to the industry much cheaper and help the industry which is struggling to cope with rising costs, Goonetileke said.

The PA has called for expressions of interest which drew responses from four engineering firms who were shown the working model on an estate. “Out of the four, three firms expressed further interest and we inspected their workshops to see their capabilities,” Goonetileke said. “We now have to decide who we going with to a make full size working model.”

The venture will be a partnership between the engineering company, the PA and Moratuwa University. Goonetileke said the locally developed machine would be built using certain imported components.

“We hope the cost would be substantially lower. The idea is to give an affordable unit to the local industry because costs are going up everyday. Previously, we could claim our VAT input. But now we can’t.”

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