Turkey’s Petkim to build Iran chemicals plant

Reuters: Turkish chemicals producer Petkim has signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran's NPC International to build a chemicals plant in the Islamic Republic, the Turkish company said on Monday.

ISTANBUL, April 20 (Reuters) – Turkish chemicals producer Petkim has signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran's NPC International to build a chemicals plant in the Islamic Republic, the Turkish company said on Monday.

The partnership between Petkim and the Iranian company will be a 50-50 joint venture, Petkim said in a statement to the stock exchange.

Petkim is partly-owned by Turkish energy company Turcas and Azeri state owned oil firm Socar.

The factory is expected to produce 1.65 million tonnes of methanol a year and 300,000 tonnes of polyethylene.

The statement said the agreement between the companies had worked out economic aspects of the deal, but no details were given.

Shares in Petkim were up 10.3 percent at 4.94 lira at 0858 GMT and Turcas shares gained 5.6 percent to 3.02 lira, outperforming Istanbul's index of leading shares .XU100 which traded up 0.1 percent.

(Writing by Thomas Grove and Alexandra Hudson; Editing by David Holmes)