KOCHI: In a bid to come out of the red, Fertilisers and Chemicals Travancore Limited (FACT) is gearing up to augment production of its flagship product Factamfos to one million tonnes a year from 7 lakh tonnes by 2020.
The public-sector fertiliser company plans to set up another Factamfos plant at its Cochin Division at a cost of Rs 300 crore.
The proposed plant will have a capacity of 1,000 tonnes per day. The company, which is struggling to clear its debts, is planning to mobilise the funds to invest by handing over the 650 acres of land to the PCL-Kochi Refinery and the Government of Kerala.
“FACT has surplus land of 650 acres at its Cochin Division, which remains idle. Of this, 170 acres will be handed over to the BPCL Kochi Refinery (BPCL KR) for its expansion project while the remaining 480 acres will be given to the state government where it is planning some industrial project. A major portion of the funds mobilised through leveraging land will be used to repay the Rs 100-crore loan to the Union government,” said D Nandakumar, director of marketing, FACT.
He added that the proposal for an additional plant is among the major proposals in the revival plan that FACT has submitted to the Union fertiliser ministry. “We hope the government will approve the proposal,” said Nandakumar.
It was in the second quarter of the current year that FACT posted a profit of Rs 6 crore, after several years. “Several external factors had influenced the company’s performance in the last quarter. We got raw materials such as RLNG (regasified liquefied natural gas), sulphur, rock phosphate / phosphoric acid at the cheap rate during last quarter.
Though there is a possibility for a change in the prices in the coming days, we are confident of registering profit in next quarter also,” Nandakumar said. With the BPCL-KR expanding its capacity, FACT is able to source sulphur locally, thereby reducing import considerably.
The company has signed an MoU with BPCL-KR for the supply of sulphur under which FACT will get 1.2 lakh tonnes of sulphur out its requirement of 2 lakh tonnes.