Thursday, Engro Fertilizers Limited (EFERT) informed the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) that its base plant is now capable of generating up to 950,000 tonnes of urea annually.
“As previously stated, Engro Fertilizers Limited (the “Company”) undertook various maintenance, debottlenecking, balancing, modernization, and replacement activities to maintain the Base Plant’s long-term reliability and safe operations. The announcement stated, “The Base Plant is now capable of producing up to 950,000 tonnes of urea per year, based on plant performance testing and assessment.”
The basic plant (Plant-1) was previously planned for 60 days of maintenance beginning September 27. After 60 days of effective maintenance, the base plant began commercial operations on November 28th, right on schedule.
It is important to notice that the base plant has outlived its usefulness. In order to evaluate the capabilities of the plant, the output capacity of the base plant was expanded from 500,000 tonnes per year to 780,000 tonnes per year last year. Now, the expansion to 950,000 tonnes per year is significant since it secures the plant’s long-term reliability and sustainability. Without such routine maintenance, there is a risk of losing a significant portion of the plant’s output capability, which could be devastating to the agriculture industry of the nation.
Two Urea plants (Base plant and EnVen) and one NPK plant (Zarkhez) are located near Daharki and Port Qasim, Karachi, respectively. The capacity of EFERT’s urea plants is 2.275 million metric tonnes (MT) (Base plant: 975,000 MT p.a and EnVen: 1,300,000 MT p.a). The total capacity of Zarkhez is 100,000MT.
EFERT recorded a Profit After Tax (PAT) of Rs. 2.5 billion for the quarter ending 30 September, compared to Rs. The reduction was caused mostly by the fertiliser industry’s super tax. For the year ending 31 December 2021, EFERT reported a PAT of over 21 billion rupees, a year-over-year rise of 25%.
