Azerbaijani company aims to boost Middle East trading

Socar Trading is also seeking to buy a refinery and is evaluating assets that are mainly in , Chief Executive Officer Valery Golovushkin said in Singapore on Thursday. “Hopefully in a couple of months we’ll finalize something,” he said.

Azerbaijan exports about 5 million barrels of crude to Asia each month and the state trading company is expanding to find new clients. Oil producers have been building refineries and gaining storage capacity to ensure outlets for their products to give them more flexibility in supplying customers.

Golovushkin said the Azeri company was in talks over several possible refinery acquisitions, including one plant in Italy. He announced at the same conference a year ago that the company had hoped to close a deal to take stakes in refinery assets this year. Acquisition plans were delayed and now are moving forward as prices for refining assets are “very attractive,” he said.

The company is in talks with an Italian refiner over a 15 million-tons-per-year plant, Golovushkin said, without naming the crude processor. The capacity for crude runs at Saras SpA’s refinery on the island of Sardinia is about 15 million tons annually, according to the company’s Web site. Golovushkin said a refinery of that size may be too big for Socar to take over. A spokeswoman for Saras had no immediate comment.

Storage Space

Socar plans to finish by the end of next year the first phase of a 650,000 cubic-meter capacity oil-products storage terminal in Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates, Golovushkin said. That will give the Azeri company an initial 300,000 cubic meters of storage space in the UAE port, which is the world’s third-largest location for supplying ship fuel.

Fujairah sits outside the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint for entry into the Persian Gulf. It may expand as an oil and products export hub when Abu Dhabi, the UAE’s largest emirate and holder of most of its oil resources, completes a crude pipeline to the coast next year. Socar may store crude at Fujairah as well, Golovushkin said.

Socar is expanding the Dubai office opened in June and plans to almost double staff by the end of this year.

Socar aims to hire two fuel traders and an operations manager in Dubai this year, bringing staff there to seven, von Langermann said. It may expand to as many as 15 people in the Dubai trading office next year, he said.


/Hurriyet Daily News/