MOSCOW (MRC) -- Reliance Industries said on Saturday it had set up a wholly-owned subsidiary in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for trading in crude oil, petroleum, petrochemical products, and agricultural commodities, said the company.
Reliance International Ltd (RINL), the new subsidiary, is yet to commence operations, the parent company said in an exchange filing, adding it had invested USD1 million in the new business.
In its brief statement, Reliance Industries, which operates the world's biggest refining complex at Jamnagar in western India, gave no reasons for its decision to set up the new unit and its reasons to locate it in the UAE, though it is in line with it becoming more international in its focus.
It previously bought stakes in a number of overseas exploration and manufacturing assets, and in June it entered an agreement with Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) to build a multi-billion dollar chemical project in Ruwais, marking the group's first investment in a Greenfield overseas project.
Reliance Industries in June announced the appointment of Saudi Aramco (2222.SE) Chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan as a director of Reliance's board and said this was the "beginning of the internationalization of Reliance". The group hopes to formalize this year a deal to sell a 20% stake in its oil-to-chemical business to Aramco.
As MRC informed earlier, Reliance Industries (RIL) has taken off-stream one of its polypropylene (PP) plants in Jamnagar, India for a scheduled maintenance. Thus, this unit with an annual capacity of 400,000 tons/year of PP was shut on 5 August 2021 and will remain idle for approximately one month. The local supply is expected to take a hit from the shutdown, especially when demand is recovering from the COVID-19 outbreak.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,176,860 tonnes in the first half of 2021, up by 5% year on year. Shipments of exclusively low density polyethylene (LDPE) decreased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 727,160 tonnes in the first six months of 2021, up by 31% year on year. Supply of homopolymer PP and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased. Supply of statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers) subsided.
Reliance Industries is one of the world's largest producers of polymers. Thus, the company produces among others polypropylene, polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride.
MRC