Akbar Brothers marks 20 years as Sri Lanka’s largest tea exporter

Thursday, 5 June 2014 00:20 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Akbar Brothers has marked 20 years as Sri Lanka’s largest tea exporter with 2013 shipments topping 50 million kilos worth over Rs. 32 billion in valuable foreign exchange to the country. “These earnings represent 17% of the foreign exchange earnings generated by Sri Lanka on total tea exports and almost 2.5% of the country’s total exports,” a spokesman for Akbar Brothers said, adding it was no minor feat in a highly-competitive international business arena. Out of 2013 exports, 37 million kilos or 74% comprised of value-added consumer products in the form of tea bags, tea packets, and ready-to-drink teas. Around 22 million kilos of the consumer products marketed were under the company’s Sri Lankan-owned brands “2013 was a challenging year for the tea export industry and many companies struggled to maintain positive results,” the spokesman said. However, due to the long term faith of their clients in the quality of their product, and the commitment and industry of their team, Akbar Brothers was able to achieve a really outstanding result. The Akbar Group possesses one of the world’s largest and most modern facilities for the packaging of teas and utilises state-of-the-art machinery from Germany, Italy and Japan for its automated tea cleaning, tea blending, tea flavouring and tea packing processes. Each of these facilities hosts its own tea tasting laboratory to ensure that the quality of tea is maintained at every stage. Both the tea bagging and tea packing facilities are ISO 9002 and HACCP certified.