Baku, Azerbaijan, June 20
By Dalga Khatinoglu – Trend:
Iran sold less petrochemical products in volume during the first two months of the current fiscal year (started on March 21), but the revenues increased.
The country exported 3.431 million tons of petrochemicals, 58 tons less than March21-May 22, 2016.
However the revenues increased by $103 million to $1.673 billion, the statistics of an official document, prepared by Iran’s National Petrochemical Company and seen by Trend, indicate.
Coming to the domestic sales, both the volume and revenue increased by 2.3 percent and 32.7 percent in first two months of the current fiscal year, compared to the same period of last year.
Iran sold 2.742 million tons of petrochemical products (including the selling products between plants to be used as feedstock) with worth 53.5 trillion rials ($1.54 billion). The net domestic petrochemical products sale stood at 1.237 million tons with worth $713 million.
Iran produced 8.95 million tons petrochemical products, of which 1.5 million tons was used as feedstock in other plants. Then, its final amount stood at 7.45 million tons in the first two months of the current fiscal year.
Iran has planned to produce 58.95 million tons of petrochemical products in the current fiscal year, 8.35 million tons more than the last fiscal year.
The document also named 56 new petrochemical projects under development with 58.412 million tons per year of nominal capacity.
Iran plans to inaugurate seven petrochemical plants in the current year and 23 more in the next year.
Iran needs $20 billion of further investment in order to double the production capacity by 2022 and $35 billion of investment more to increase the figure to 150 mn mt/yr by 2025.
Source: NPC, Iran’s petrochemicals export from March 2006 to March 2017
Iran’s nominal petrochemical production capacity stands at 73 million tons per year.
The country’s petrochemical sector is one the country’s rapidly growing industrial sectors, which experienced a 7-percent growth in nominal capacity during the last fiscal year.
Iran’s actual production level during the previous year (2014/2015) also was 46.41 million tons.
The country’s net sales of petrochemical products, that is, excluding sales to domestic plants as feedstock, were 27.584 million tons, including 20.39 million tons of exports during last fiscal year.
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Dalga Khatinoglu is the head of Trend Agency’s Iran news service, follow him on Twitter: @dalgakhatinoglu