Ittehad Chemicals to expand capacity

Newer and efficient plants to cut cost, improve profitability.

KARACHI: Ittehad Chemicals, a listed chemical producer based outside Lahore, announced on Tuesday that it was replacing its current caustic soda plant – dense soda ash (DSA) plant – with an ion exchange membrane plant, says a notice sent by the company to the Karachi Stock Exchange.

Replacing the older plant will help the company expand its capacity to 50,000 tons per year, and the project will be executed in two phases each having a capacity of producing 25,000 tons per annum of soda.

The notice went on to say that the company has successfully managed to open a letter of credit for the ion exchange membrane plant which will arrive at the company’s location by the end of February of 2014 and will be commissioned by end of September 2014. The plant site is located an hour away from central Lahore and covers an area of 106 acres.

The company’s management has been very busy expanding their production capacity throughout the years. In 2003, it installed its first environment-friendly ion exchange membrane plant adding about 60,000 tons per year to the chemical company’s production capacity. However, the new plant needed uninterrupted power supply to operate, thus accordingly, the company had installed its own 30 megawatt power plant in 2005 for trouble-free operations.

Ittehad Chemicals believes that the newer plant will cut costs and further improve the chemical producer’s profitability.

In the first nine months of the fiscal year 2012-13, Ittehad Chemicals managed to increase its profitability 155 times to Rs219 million from Rs1.4 million in the corresponding period of fiscal 2012, according to the latest financial report available on the company’s website.

During trading at the KSE on Tuesday, the company’s stock was valued at Rs44 per share.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 14^th, 2013.

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