Taipei - Taiwan's Formosa Plastics Corp has broken ground on
a steel mill in Vietnam, which will become the world's sixth-largest
when it launches full-scale operation, a newspaper said on
Monday.
Formosa Plastics, Taiwan's largest petrochemical manufacturing
conglomerate, held a ground-breaking ceremony for the steel
mill on Sunday in Ha Tinh province, 340 kilometres
south of Vietnamese capital Hanoi, the Economic Daily News reported.
Vietnam attaches great importance to the steel mill because it is
the biggest single foreign investment in the communist state and
accounts for half of Vietnam's inbound-investment in 2008, making
Formosa Plastics Vietnam's top foreign investor.
Some 1,000 Vietnamese, including Premier Nguyen Tan Dung and two
dozen officials, attended the ground-breaking ceremony.
The steel mill will be built in three stages. When the first
stage, costing 8 billion US dollars, is finished later this year, the
plant will produce 7.5 million tons of steel annually, the paper
quoted Formosa Plastics Chairman Wang Wen-yuan as saying.
In the second stage, the output will double and in the third
stage, expected to be finished in 2011, the annual output will reach
30 million tons, making it Asia's second-largest, and the world's
sixth-largest steel project after the newly-formed Hebei Iron and
Steel Corp whose annual output is 31.6 million tons.
Wang said Formosa Plastics plans to build a deep-water port on the
Ha Tinh coast so that the company can ship steel-making equipment to
the Vietnam plant.
Formosa Plastics' steel mill will need 40,000-50,000 workers, and
it may hire workers from from China, Laos and Cambodia as Ha Tinh
province has a small population, the Economic Daily News said.
At the ground-breaking ceremony, Premier Nguyen Tan Dung invited
Formosa Plastics to build a petro-chemical complex in Vietnam.
Wang said Formosa Plastics is willing to make a feasibility
study, provided that Vietnam has fully liberalized its policies
regarding crude and crude products.
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