Haldia Petro Expenditure To Touch Rs 2000 Cr By July

Expenditure for the Rs 5,170-crore Haldia Petrochemicals(HPL) project, currently under execution, is slated to touch Rs 2,000 crore by July this year.

The company expects to pump in an estimated Rs 1,000 crore between March and July as work on the project site progresses.

Around Rs 1,000 crore has already been spent on the construction which includes the promoters' contribution of Rs 630 crore. HPL has planned to raise Rs 100 crore at a time in tranches through private placements.

However, its target of raising Rs 100 crore through this route in December last year had to be shelved after RBI announced a hike in bank interest rates.

Prior to that, one tranche of Rs 100 crore-debenture issues through private placements has already been placed.

The public offer will be made only after the completion of the project in 1999. Till such time, the promoters will pick up quasi-equity from the international market.

The public offer will take out some of the substitute equity that is already raised, said Vijay K Chaudhry, president (commercial), HPL.

The project is promoted jointly by the Chatterjee-Soros fund, the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation (WBIDC), and the Tata group in the ratio of 3:3:1.

The promoters had already paid in Rs 505 crore which is half their equity of Rs 1,010 crore in 1996 to avail of the deferred payment guarantee from the Industrial Development Bank of India(IDBI) so that the construction engineers, Toyo Corporation of Japan could commence work at the mother naphtha cracker plant.

The end-products will be polyethylene, polypropylene and building block chemicals such as benzene, butadiene, C4 and C6 raffinates and pyrolysis gasoline.

A total of 425,000 tonne per annum of polyethylene and 210,000 tonne per annum of polypropylene alongwith 415,000 per annum of chemical products.

The project is expected to increase regional consumption of polymers from the current 7 per cent to at least 11 per cent of all-India consumption by end 1999-2000.

The current per capita consumption of polymers in the country ranks among the lowest in the world, at less than 2 kg per annum.The world average per capita consumption is 18 kg.