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.