Taiwan to move plant to RI

Taiwan to move plant to RI

TAIPEI (AFP): Taiwan's state-run Chinese Petroleum Corp. (CPC) is planning to move a mothballed naphtha cracking plant to Indonesia, CPC officials said yesterday.

CPC will team up with local and Indonesian petrochemical firms to relocate the cracker at a cost of US$500 million, the officials said.

The CPC, 100 percent owned by the economic ministry, will hold a 30 percent share in the planned project, local private investors 50 percent, and the rest to Indonesian partners, they said.

The cracker, which started operations in 1975 with annual output of 230, 000 tons of ethylene, was closed in 1994 when the CPC's fifth such plant opened with a capacity of 400,000 tons of ethylene, they added.

CPC, the island's largest manufacturer with annual turnover accounting for five percent of Taiwan's gross national product, posted interim pretax profits of $7.63 billion for the six months to December, a 29.5-percent slide from a year earlier.