Palm oil sales rise 15%: London Sumatra

Palm oil sales rise 15%: London Sumatra

JAKARTA: PT PP London Sumatra Indonesia, which operates about 87,000 hectares of oil-palm plantations, expects sales to rise 15 percent in 2005 after it boosts output, said Agustino Sudjono, the company's investor relations manager.

Sales may rise to Rp 1.9 trillion (US$201 million) this year from Rp 1.65 trillion the previous year, Sudjono said in a phone interview on Monday. He did not provide a forecast in sales volume.

Indonesia, the world's biggest oil-palm grower after Malaysia, may export as much as 7.8 million metric tons of the edible oil this year, compared with an estimated seven million tons in 2004, according to the Indonesia's palm oil producers' association.

Palm oil futures on the Malaysian Derivatives Exchange fell 26.2 percent in the past year. Palm oil for June delivery, the most-active contract, fell 3 ringgit, or 0.2 percent, to 1,441 ringgit ($379) at 5:40 p.m. Kuala Lumpur time.

London Sumatra exported two fifths of what it sold last year, the company said in a quarterly report to investors. Palm oil is used to make cooking oil and chemicals used in soap and detergent.

The company's output of crude palm oil and palm kernels may rise 11 percent to 400,000 tons this year from 360,798 tons in 2003, Sudjono said. About four-fifths of the company's total output is palm oil, while the rest is palm kernel.

London Sumatra's crude palm oil extraction rate in 2004 was 24.4 percent, Sudjono said. That compares with Indonesia's industry average of 21 percent. Indonesia's largest publicly traded agriculture company PT Astra Agro Lestari had an extraction rate of 22.8 percent last year. -- Bloomberg