Qapco rejects offer to bid for Turkey's Petkim

26 March 2007 09:19  [Source: ICIS news]

By Prema Viswanathan

SINGAPORE (ICIS news)--Qatar Petrochemical Co (Qapco) has rejected an offer to bid for Turkish petrochemicals producer Petkim Petrokimya Holding, a Qapco source said on Monday. 

State-run Petkim earlier this month invited companies to bid for a majority stake to revive its privatisation. Turkey’s privatisation board has set 15 June as the deadline, hoping to attract bids from a sufficient number of companies to restart the process.

"We received an invitation to bid from Petkim, but decided not to accept it as we have too many investments in our own country to focus on," the source said. 

Qapco is involved in a few local projects, including expanding a 525,000 tonne/year cracker, building a new 250,000 tonne/year low density polyethylene (LDPE) unit and a 450,000 tonne/year linear low density PE (LLDPE) plant at Mesaieed, and building a 1.3m tonne/year ethane cracker in Ras Laffan.

The Turkish government sold 35% of Petkim's shares in April 2005 for $270m (€203m) via a public offering on the Istanbul Stock Exchange.

The sale was dogged with problems including an earthquake which damaged some of the company’s facilities, and the failure in 2003 of potential suitor Standart Kimya to come up with the required cash.

In September last year, the company appointed AK Investment Securities and Raiffeisen INV to act as main consultants on the divestment of the government’s 54.8% stake.

Petkim makes a range of polyolefins, aromatics, chlor-alkali, purified terephthalic acid (PTA) and phthalic anhydride (PA) at its plants in Aliaga and Yarimka.

By: Prema Viswanathan
+65 6780 4359

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