ZAWYA DOW JONES BEIRUT QATAR Fertiliser (Qafco) expects to start operations at its under-construction Qafco VI train in December, an executive of the company has said.

This will boost Qafco’s annual production capacity of urea to 5.6 million tonnes, which would be 15 percent of the world’s output of this fertiliser, Khalifa al Suwaidi, the company’s general manager, was quoted as saying.

The prices of petrochemical products were good now and Qafco intended to enter new markets worldwide, a Doha-based Arabic daily quoted him as saying.

The Qafco VI project includes the construction of a urea plant with a total daily production capacity of 3,850 tonnes. The construction work was scheduled to take approximately 35 months with completion around the end of third quarter 2012.

In October 2009, Qafco and a consortium of the Italian company Saipem and the Korean company Hyundai signed a letter of intent for the EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) of the Qafco VI expansion project.

A top company official had said during the inauguration of Qafco V last December that the company was the top urea supplier to Australia and South Africa and the second biggest supplier to the US.

“In future we will like to expand our markets in South America especially in Brazil. The South American country will require lots of urea in future and we look forward to establishing a big market there,” he had said.

Qafco products have markets in some 35 countries across the world.

Currently, Qafco leads the global fertiliser manufacturers with an 18 percent share of the global urea supply.

Established in 1969, Qatar Fertiliser Company is 75 percent owned by metals-to-petrochemical conglomerate Industries Qatar and 25 percent owned by Norway’s Yara International