PASIR GUDANG: All Cosmos Industries Sdn Bhd will invest RM200mil to set up two bio-organic fertiliser plants, in Medan, Indonesia and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, in 2011.
Chief executive officer Datuk Tony Peng said the plants, costing RM100mil each, would produce 3-in-1 oil palm fertilisers, with the Medan plant catering to palm oil plantations in Sumatra and the Ho Chi Minh City outfit for Vietnamese growers.
“The company wants to establish itself as the leading producer of oil palm bio-organic fertilisers in the world,’’ he said in an interview with StarBiz recently.
Datuk Tony Peng … ‘The company wants to establish itself as the leading producer in the world.’ Peng said prospects for the oil palm bio-organic fertiliser were good considering the world’s largest producers of palm oil, Malaysia and Indonesia, had some 4.3 million and 5 million ha of oil palm plantations respectively.
He said oil palm growers in Malaysia spent more than RM5bil yearly on fertilisers and the figure would be higher in Indonesia.
Peng said there was also a growing concern worldwide on the wide usage of chemical fertilisers in the agriculture sector; hence many growers and planters were switching to bio-organic fertilisers.
He said bio-organic fertilisers had greater advantages such as boosting productivity through improvement in soil structure. Besides growing global demand for crude palm oil, the Philippines, Vietnam, and African and South American countries were also venturing into large-scale oil palm plantations, he said.
Peng said the company’s fertiliser was also suitable for crops such as padi, hence All Cosmos would target countries with large-scale rice farming – Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines.
“We are also looking at setting up plants in Libya and Iran, probably after 2011, to produce fertilisers for palm date trees for the Middle Eastern region as the crop is similar to oil palm,’’ he said.
Peng said there were plans to develop within the next one to two years 4-in-1 oil palm fertilisers to prevent fungus and other plant diseases which affect mostly the roots.
He said the company’s new RM7mil research and development (R&D) centre near its existing plant would be ready soon.
“All R&D activities will take place at the new centre from next year and we want to turn Malaysia into the R&D centre for our operations,’’ said Peng.
The company would also venture into mass production of micro-organisms such as Azotobacter and Clostridium which can be used in its fertilisers.
It has received grants from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and the Malaysian Palm Oil Board to undertake the micro-organisim venture.
All Cosmos is a Malaysia-based Taiwanese venture set up in 1999 to produce high-yielding bio-organic fertilisers through advanced technological methods.
It has invested RM50mil in its 10,000 sq m Johor plant and 80% of the fertilisers produced here under the brand Real Strong are for the domestic market, mainly oil palm plantations.
The company also has a plant in Gaomi, Shandong in China producing bio-organic fertilisers used mainly for fruit and vegetable growers there.
The plants have a combined annual production capacity of 300,000 tonnes of bio-organic fertilisers, making it one of the biggest fertiliser producers in Asia.
The company’s bio-organic fertiliser is a combination of organic, non-organic and micro-organism materials and comes in pellet, powder and liquid form. Source : The Star by Zazali Musa
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