M&G to build world's largest PET plant in Brazil

The M&G Group plans to build the world's largest PET plant near the town of Ipojuca in North Eastern Brazil, expected to come on-stream in late 2006. The new plant will have a capacity of 450kta (approximately 990 million lbs/year) In addition, M&G is actively studying options to vertically integrate the new PET plant, for which M&G signed a MOU with Petrobas to start the evaluation of possible joint investments upstream in the PET chain. However, the evaluation into additional investment opportunities requires further research before any firm commitment can be made. This new investment demonstrates M&G's continued commitment to the future of Brazil as a major PET manufacturing country and, more generally, to the global PET industry. * Ipojuca is a city of about 60,000 inhabitants, located in the north east cost of Brazil about 60km from the State capital in the Metropolitan Region of Recife. The city is considered to be one of the largest industrial centres of Pernambuco as it includes part of the Industrial and Port Complex of Suape. M&G is a family owned chemical engineering company headquartered in Tortona, Italy. It develops innovative and cost effective PET resins for container packaging and is presently the world's second largest producer of PET for packaging applications with production capacity of 1.3 million tpa. Group sales proceeds in 2003 were US$1.6 billion of which around 80% were derived from operations involving PET. * M&G Group is divided into three business units, PET Polymer, PET Packaging and Acetates. In Europe, M&G has capacity to produce around 2.5 billion preforms per annum at two locations in Italy. It operates the largest SSP unit in North America and has the current world's largest PET production unit (1200t/d) at its Altamira facility in Mexico. The Group has manufacturing assets in Brazil, Italy, Mexico and USA. The Group supports three R&D Facilities; Italy, USA and Brazil.