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เมื่อวันที่ 20 -21 กันยายน 2550 คณะทำงานเฉพาะกิจเพื่อการศึกษาและพัฒนาข้อเสนอเชิงนโยบายเกี่ยวกับอุตสาหกรรมเกลือและโพแทซ โดย นายสุธรรม จิตตานุเคราะห์ รองประธานสภาที่ปรึกษาเศรษฐกิจและสังคมแห่งชาติ คนที่ 1 ในฐานะประธานคณะทำงานเฉพาะกิจฯ ได้นำคณะ ประกอบด้วย น.ส.สุรีรัตน์ ตรีมรรคา ประธานคณะทำงานพัฒนาคุณภาพชีวิต สาธารณสุข และคุ้มครองผู้บริโภค นายวีรวัธน์ ธีรประสาธน์ ประธานคณะทำงานวิทยาศาสตร์ เทคโนโลยี ทรัพยากรธรรมชาติ และสิ่งแวดล้อม นายปริญญา ศิริสารการ นายอโณทัย ฤทธิปัญญาวงศ์ นายธีรวัจน์ นามดวง และนายภาคภูมิ วิธานติรวัฒน์ พร้อมกับผู้ทรงคุณวุฒิจากภายนอก ได้แก่ รศ.มนตรี บุญเสนอ จากมหาวิทยาลัยขอนแก่น นายสุวรรณ แดงบัว ประธานสหกรณ์เกลือโคราช และนายอรุณ อินเจริญศักดิ์ และเจ้าหน้าที่สำนักงานสภาที่ปรึกษาฯ อีก 4 ท่าน ร่วมเดินทางเข้าเยี่ยมเยียน ศึกษาดูงานอุตสาหกรรมเกลือและโพแทซครบวงจร โดยจุดแรกได้รับฟังการบรรยายพิเศษอุตสาหกรรมเกลือ และกระบวนการผลิตเกลือของบริษัท เกลือพิมาย จำกัด หรือที่หลายคนรู้จักกันในชื่อสินค้า ‘เกลือปรุงทิพย์’ โดย นายอรุณ อินเจริญศักดิ์ ผู้อำนวยการบริษัท เกลือพิมาย จำกัด ได้กรุณาให้ความรู้และพาคณะเข้าเยี่ยมเยีอน โรงงานผลิตเกลือพิมาย โดยเฉพาะส่วนขยายที่ 5 ซึ่งเป็นส่วนที่เริ่มดำเนินการเมื่อไม่นานมานี้
จากนั้น ได้เดินทางไปยังกิ่งอำเภอพระทองคำ จังหวัดนครราชสีมา เพื่อดูงานการผลิตเกลือชาวบ้าน และพบปะพูดคุยกับชาวบ้านผู้ประกอบการอุตสาหกรรมเกลือพื้นบ้าน ซึ่งปัจจุบันเป็นนอกฤดูการผลิต อย่างไรก็ดี ทางคณะก็ได้สำรวจขอบเขตพื้นที่การผลิตดังกล่าว พร้อมกับสอบถามถึงปัญหาและอุปสรรคจากการประกอบอาชีพอย่างสนใจ และใกล้ชิดเป็นกันเองอย่างมาก
นอกจากนี้ ได้ไปศึกษาดูงานโครงการทำเหมืองแร่โปแตชของอาเซียน อำเภอบำเหน็จณรงค์ จังหวัดชัยภูมิ โดยรับฟังการบรรยายสรุปจาก นายทนง พรหมมา ผู้อำนวยการฝ่ายประชาสัมพันธ์ บริษัทเหมืองแร่โปแตชอาเซียน จำกัด (มหาชน) ซึ่งบริษัทดังกล่าวเป็นร่วมทุนจากหลายชาติในอาเซียน ได้แก่ ไทย อินโดนีเซีย มาเลเซีย ญี่ปุ่น สิงคโปร์ ฟิลิปปินส์ และบรูไน มีทุนจดทะเบียนมากกว่า 1.6 พันล้านบาท พร้อมกับรับฟังความคิดเห็นของผู้บริหารองค์กรปกครองส่วนท้องถิ่นทั้ง 4 องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบล ได้แก่ บ้านตาล บ้านชวน บ้านเพชร และบ้านหัวทะเล อย่างไรก็ดี การดำเนินงานในปัจจุบัน อยู่ระหว่างรอความชัดเจนเชิงนโยบายในการเพิ่มทุนเพื่อให้โครงการดังกล่าวสามารถเดินเครื่องได้เต็มประสิทธิภาพของโครงการที่กำหนดไว้ ต่อไป
ก่อนเดินทางกลับสภาที่ปรึกษาฯ ทางคณะทำงานฯ ได้รับเกียรติจากโครงการนำเยี่ยมชมการทำเหมืองแร่โปแตซภายใต้ความลึกจากผืนดิน ประมาณ 170 เมตร ลักษณะการขุดเจาะในลักษณะ room and pillar แม้ว่าจะเป็นการขุดเจาะในส่วนของหลุมทดลองก็ตามทางคณะเองล้วนได้รับประโยชน์จากการสำรวจพื้นที่จริงครั้งนี้เป็นอย่างมาก และจะนำไปเป็นข้อมูลประกอบการพิจารณาพัฒนาเป็นข้อเสนอเชิงนโยบายภาพรวมเกี่ยวกับอุตสาหกรรมและโพแทซ ต่อไป
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INTERNATIONAL
THE GREAT RUSSIAN FERTILIZER TAKEOVER
World potash prices could rocket on Sibur plan
A takeover plan by Sibur-Mineral Fertilizers to consolidate Russian mineral and chemical fertilizers will press upward on the international potash price.
Author: John Helmer
Posted: Tuesday , 18 Sep 2007
MOSCOW –
One of the world’s largest plays in consolidating mineral and chemical fertilizer assets is under way in Russia.
The outcome of this almost unrecognized, and unreported, contest could wind up restricting the flow of mined potash to major international consumers. And because Russia has become the swing producer and international market-maker in the commodity, what is happening now could light a rocket under the price of potash in the coming year.
To understand how something as peculiar as this can make easy and big money, you must start with the simple arithmetic of what used to be called manure. There are 3 ingredients in fertilizers to stimulate plant and food growth; there are 2 types of fertilizer; and 2 ways of thinking about them commercially, based on how they are manufactured.
The three plant nutrients are potassium, phosphorus, and nitrogen. The two types of fertilizer, containing these nutrients, are organic, if the elements come from naturally occurring biochemical transformations, such as animal residues or composting; or inorganic, if the elements are manufactured chemically.
Another way of viewing the production of fertilizers is whether they are mined, or synthesized chemically. Mineral fertilizers like phosphate and potash are dug out of the ground — as rock from pits, such as those in Russia, Belarus, and Canada, where most of the world’s potash reserves are located; or from water-borne salts, in evaporation pans in Jordan and Israel. Chemical fertilizers, containing nitrogen, are refined out of natural gas, and its byproduct, ammonia (aka — nitrogen hydride, NH3).
Farming mixes nitrogen, phosphate, and potash for application to the soil. But in the stock market, companies producing a mix of chemical and mineral fertilizers are assigned an asset discount. That’s because the cost of natural gas makes up about 90% of the cost of producing ammonia and its fertilizer offtakes. You might say that nitrogen fertilizer is nothing more than the conversion of a gas into a solid, but with greater profitability than the feedstock.
There’s an obvious reason the profitability of this conversion causes the market to devalue the chemical fertilizer companies — the price of natural gas can go sharply up, and down, in tandem with crude oil. Volatile energy pricing makes for unpredictable costing; and if you are stuck at the end of the fertilizer production chain, squeezed profitability.
So, when you are in the nitrogen business, you find that the market doesn’t like you as much as when you are in the potash business. The underlying fundamentals of demand for fertilizers — more mouths to feed, more food at a higher price, less land to grow it on, premium pricing for the fertilizers essential to lift crop yields — favour the market caps and valuations of pure potash plays. In the global market, there are very few of these. Russia happens to host two of the big three — Uralkali and Silvinit.
It also happens that, at the beginning of time, the great global manure god favoured the production of nitrogen fertilizer in Russia as well. That’s because Russia is endowed with the world’s largest reserves of natural gas, and the world’s largest producer and exporter of gas, Gazprom.
So long as the Russian economy was under Soviet control, the economics of gas pricing were driven by the domestic priority of holding gas prices down, and the relatively higher priority of limiting the cost of fertilizers, in order to sustain agricultural yields, raise crop output, and achieve self-sufficiency in food supply. Then, after the collapse of the planned economy, a decade of asset larceny and cashflow fraud followed.
Recently, another way of thinking about fertilizer occurred to a fresh group of Russian entrepreneurs connected to the production and sale of gas. Because that business is dominated by Gazprom, and because this is more a ministry than a corporation, the entrepreneurs we are talking about happen to be government officials, or Gazprom officials, or some combination of the two.
Here’s what they have been thinking. If nitrogen products, like ammonia, are mostly gas, and if the profitability of selling gas in the domestic, price-regulated market is lower than the price of selling gas derivatives in the export market, then why not buy up Russian exporters of ammonia, and enjoy the bigger profit margin at the point of export sale?
That’s a rhetorical question; the answer is obvious. But this isn’t quite so for those divisions of Gazprom, which make their living taking cash from domestic sales to the chemical fertilizer producers. In short, some departments of Gazprom favour investing in downstream fertilizer production, and holding down the gas cost, so as to increase the profit margin for fertilizer exports. Other departments of Gazprom favour the highest domestic price of gas they can fetch — and keeping their cash-paying customers, the ammonia converters and nitrogen fertilizer manufacturers, without taking them over.
There are billions of dollars at stake in the contest between these factions. Accordingly, the decision has been kicked up to the Kremlin, where President Vladimir Putin’s advisers are still thinking which way to go.
Last December, a strategy for downstream acquisitions of fertilizer companies was drafted by Sibur-Mineral Fertilizers (SMF), a brand new unit of Sibur, and flag-waver for the fertilizer takeover crowd.
Sibur Holding, in turn, is the semi-divested downstream production and sales division of Gazprom. Headed by Dmitri Konov, it has a product portfolio including most of the petrochemicals (76% of revenues); tyres (16%), plastics feedstocks and chemical fibres (8%). Audited revenues in 2006 totaled to Rb121.9 billion ($4.5 billion).
The holding’s motto, headlining its website, is "the art of subtle transformation". Just how subtle Sibur needs to be is spelled out in the small print of the auditor’s notes to the IFRS financial statements for last year. Referring to Russian transfer pricing rules, introduced in 1999, making taxable transaction prices that differ from market prices by more than 20%, the notes caution: "it is possible with the evolution of the interpretation of the Russian transfer pricing rules…that such transactions could potentially be challenged in the future."
Head of the new SMF is Andrei Teterkin (pronounce: tet-yor-kin), a petrochemicals executive at the defunct Yukos group, then head of strategy for the Evraz steel group. In February 2007, he took charge of SMF. In May he got the SMF board to accept what the company briefly described as "the concept of the development strategy focused on further company’s growth in Russian mineral fertilizers market." According to an industry analyst, "I don’t believe Gazprom allows SMF to swim alone in the sea, so these papers were jointly produced, and it’s difficult to identify where the head sits."
To build momentum behind his fertilizer asset plan, Teterkin has briefed Moscow investment banks on his business plan, and leaked pages of it to the Moscow business media. The idea started to become public in July — buy up the Russian fertilizer makers, who depend on gas, and raise profitability on the spread between the cost of the input and the value of the output. SMF currently owns 76% of Kemerovo Azot Joint Stock Company (ammonia) and a minority stake in Orton JSC (Kemerovo), which it took over from the holding structure. Early in September, it announced the purchase of a 3.15% stake in Perm Mineral Fertilizers (PMF). Another 31% or more of PMF has reportedly been sold to an unidentified consolidator; this looks to be Teterkin. The price paid of about $200 million, according to industry analysts, was at a 40% premium to the market valuation of PMF. Teterkin is also reported to be negotiating for an increase in SMF’s 14% shareholding in Rossosh Minudobreniya.
Just how small mineral fertilizers amounted to in Sibur’s business was reported in the financial statements for 2006, before SMF was formed. In that year, sales of mineral fertilizers came to just Rb3.6 billion ($132 million), just 3% of Sibur’s aggregate sales.
According to Teterkin’s strategy document, SMF currently holds just 9% of the Russian nitrogen fertilizers market. By 2009, he aims to take a 50% share.
Among the nitrogen fertilizer producers targeted for takeover so far, the biggest is resisting; this is Togliatti Azot (ToAZ), which is controlled by chief executive Vladimir Makhlai. ToAZ is the largest of Russia’s ammonia producers, and the single largest cash customer for Gazprom gas. The takeover attempt has also involved regional government tax checks, and a civil lawsuit alleging transfer pricing violations (now dismissed). Direct negotiations between Sibur and ToAZ were reported in April. Five months later, no outcome is clear.
Another target has been the Odessa Port Plant (OPP), the second largest fertilizer producer in the Ukraine. On September 12, however, the government in Kiev intervened, issuing an immediate ban on the scheduled privatization sale of the company for fear that it would pass into Russian hands. The SMF strategy document totes up the acquisition cost of ToAZ, OPP, and various sized stakes in other Russian companies at more than $3 billion. If successful, the Teterkin plan estimates the capital value of SMF in 2009 at $5 billion.
Teterkin’s acquisition plan for SMF goes further than nitrogen fertilizers. His proposed buy-back of apatite assets, reclaimed by the government from the Yukos group, would establish SMF strongly in the phosphate business.
Teterkin aims at taking control of the potash fertilizer companies as well. A source, who has been shown the SMF business plan, told Mineweb: "My personal opinion is that the potash part of the plan is far from alive, but it is there, in the papers." Teterkin’s scheme, as it has been reported from the SMF business plan, concedes that SMF will need a local partner to accumulate the capital and cash required to enter the potash market. But if that can be negotiated, the plan calls for an aggressive takeover of potash miners.
According to the Teterkin plan, if he gets his way, by 2009 SMF will hold 58 % of the home market for ammonia; 65% for phosphate (apatite) fertilizers; and 48 % for potash fertilizers.
Mikhail Stiskin, fertilizer sector analyst at Troika investment bank in Moscow, told Mineweb: "For now we see that Sibur assigned a separate entity for fertilizers. The growth of this entity seems logical to me into chemical and nitrogen fertilizers as production of these two significantly depends on the gas, which Gazprom can supply. For now Sibur-Mineral Fertilizers doesn’t have any serious assets, but the trend is very clear – it is that Sibur doesn’t want to limit itself only to nitrogen fertilizers, but to move into potash and phosphates. The logic is that the companies producing all three types of fertilizers, and which can mix them to produce mixed fertilizers, are quoted at significantly higher multiples than single fertilizer producers. As to the multiples – the potash producers have the highest within the fertilizer industry. If Sibur will go this way it will have to acquire Silvinit and Apatit. Both companies have problems in management, and can be pushed to lower their sale value by Gazprom."
Uralkali, Russia’s largest potash producer and the world’s largest pure potash play, is already too big for SMF to swallow, according to industry sources. Current market capitalization of Uralkali is $6.2 billion; this may reach $7 billion when and if Uralkali launches an IPO in London later this year. An announcement on this is expected in few weeks. For the foreseeable future, Uralkali is bigger than SMF.
That exposes Silvinit to a Sibur takeover. Yelena Sakhnova, analyst with the United Financial Group in Moscow, told Mineweb: "I really doubt Pyotr Kondrashov will sell Silvinit to Sibur. It is hard to guess what will happen to potash prices if this purchase will be made. I saw the Sibur plan and can tell you that it has all assets in the industry you can imagine."
"There is no doubt that the fertilizer industry has to be consolidated", says Marina Alexeyenkova of Renaissance Capital, "as everything depends on gas prices, which are rising. I saw the [Teterkin] strategy and can confirm it has Silvinit and FosAgro there." A source close to Silvinit told Mineweb that a recent decision by Silvinit’s board to lift dividend payments to shareholders by eight times, compared to 2005, is strongly suggestive of the belief on the board that Gazprom will use its muscle to back an SMF takeover.
The parallel moves by SMF into phosphates and potash can be delayed. But sources inside the fertilizer industry tell Mineweb they believe the strategic momentum of state intervention to control the price of fertilizers to the Russian farm market cannot be resisted.
Concern for the rising prices of farm grains, and of bread, have been troubling election campaign managers for the Kremlin for months. The appointment last week of Victor Zubkov as Russia’s new prime minister is likely to reinforce the sensitivities of the new government to farmers and consumers; Zubkov’s early career was as an administrator of collective farms in the Leningrad region.
A well-placed source in Moscow told Mineweb: "the impact of SMF’s takeover of Silvinit, which now looks probable, is that Gazprom will direct a sizeable part of its potash production to satisfy demand in the domestic market. The government’s anti-monopoly agency has already sent public signals that the price of potash is too high for Russian farms to afford. So you can expect that Gazprom will certainly consider the wishes of Russia’s agro-industry."
This in turn is likely to impact on the volume of Russian exports of potash, part of which are managed by Belarusian Potash Corporation (BPC), a joint venture of Uralkali and Belaruskali; Silvinit does not market its exports through the BPC.
Silvinit, according to industry sources, cannot lift its production capacity by much; Uralkali can. The latter announced last week that in the eight months of this year to August 31, it turned out 3.4 milion tonnes of potash; this is up 33% on the same period of 2006.
If Gazprom eats Silvinit, it is anticipated that Silvinit will be obliged to satisfy the government’s priority, and divert its current export tonnage of potash to domestic sales. Company reports indicate that in 2006 Silvinit produced 5.3 million tonnes of potash (K2O, up 7% on 2005). Export volume was 80%. Counting both Silvinit and Uralkali, domestic supplies of potash in 2006 amounted to about 1.5 million tonnes. Annual consumption of potash fertilizers in Russia has been projected by the federal government to double in three years to about 2.4 million tonnes.
Diversion of 1 million tonnes from export – about 14% of the current export total – would be felt immediately as a deficit of Russian potash available for sale internationally. That market has already been feeling the impact of 3% to 5% annual growth of demand, and prices have been rising sharply.
Teterkin’s business plan for the great Russian fertilizer takeover has yet to be fully endorsed by his bosses at Gazprom and the Kremlin. But the scramble for assets is already transmitting a signal that, for supplies of potash over the next two years, the commodity market should be prepared to accept higher prices. Accordingly, the stock market is preparing a wager on the acceleration of share prices for the potash producers.
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