Chandra Asri revamping

Chandra Asri revamping

TOKYO (Dow Jones): Japan's Marubeni Corp. plans to complete the revamp of Indonesia's PT Chandra Asri Merak Petrochemical Center by end-2000, despite political and financial uncertainty in the country, an official with the trading house told Dow Jones Newswires yesterday.

Marubeni owns a 21.2 percent stake in Chandra Asri, which is led by Indonesia's former president Soeharto's middle son Bambang Trihatmodjo.

Chandra Asri was originally planned to increase ethylene production capacity by 165,000 metric tons a year from the current 510,000 tons/year in the autumn of 1998. However, this was rescheduled to 1999, and again delayed to the end of 2000, the official said.

"In order to meet growing ethylene requirement in the country and to cut running costs at the complex, we plan to start revamping construction at Chandra Asri in the middle of next year, so that the expansion will be completed by the end of 2000," the Marubeni official added.

With steady recovery in domestic ethylene and propylene demand for petrochemical feedstock, the Chandra Asri Merak complex is operating at about 90 percent of capacity as of the middle of July, the company official noted.