(ICIS) -- Lotte Pakistan PTA (Lotte PPTA) plans to triple its purified terephthalic acid (PTA) nameplate capacity to 1.5m tonnes/year by late 2014 to meet the growing domestic and regional demand, a company executive said on Thursday. The company has a 500 KTa plant located at Port Qasim, 50 km (31 miles) outside the industrial port city of Karachi.
⌠The cost of expansion will be between USD 450m (EUR 320m) to USD 500m, said Asif Saad, CEO of Lotte PPTA, the only PTA manufacturer in the country. ⌠If it goes according to plan, it [the new capacity] should start up by the end of 2014, Saad told ICIS in an email from Karachi.
Lotte, the South Korean conglomerate, acquired the majority share holding in Pakistan PTA Limited (PPTA) in September 2009. The name of the company was subsequently changed to Lotte Pakistan PTA, according to company's website.
According to the website, Lotte PPTA has made the single largest foreign direct investment to date of USD 490m in Pakistan's petrochemical industry.
The PTA output from the company's existing 500 KTa plant is sold in the domestic market. However, a small quantity is exported every year, mainly to the Middle East and India and occasionally to China, Saad said.