GPIC's export of granular urea to the US has exceeded 50 per cent in the third quarter of this year, it has been announced.

There had been intense price and demand volatility in the first half of this year as international markets tried to come to grips with the deteriorating financial markets, rapidly falling crop prices, fierce competition amongst traders and limited demand for fertilisers and petrochemicals.

However, with the start of the third quarter of this year prices for urea and other fertilisers have started to recover slowly as demand to refill inventories from the US, Europe, Latin American and Asian buyers has picked up.

GPIC has exported more than 496,000 metric tonnes (mt) of granular urea to international markets during January to September this year, while its methanol exports have exceeded 290,000mt for the same period.

Out of these quantities, GPIC has successfully exported more than 261,000mt of granular urea to the US market which accounts for more than 53pc of the company's total urea export share for this year.

GPIC general manager Abdulrahman Jawahery said exports to the US were an important and strategic market for the company's granular urea.

He said that in addition to granular urea sales, GPIC had also successfully exported more than 120,000mt of methanol to the US market.

This accounts for almost 41pc of the company's total methanol exports for the same period.

The urea market in the US, he explained, was currently estimated at almost 11 million mt, while the methanol market was around 7m mt per annum.

These statistics, he said, were very encouraging and clearly indicated that there was future potential for GPIC to enhance its exports to this market.

Mr Jawahery praised Bahrain's leadership and government for their vision, foresight and efforts in promoting Bahraini products in international markets and especially the signing of the US-Bahrain Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in 2006, which heralded a new era in US-Bahrain business relations.

This historic agreement had firmly placed Bahrain on the international trade map and opened up the way to attract new investments, joint ventures, enhance the competence of national products in the US market and boost economic growth in all sectors of the Bahraini economy including petrochemicals and fertilisers.

He further added that GPIC had benefited immensely with respect to preferential treatment on custom duties on its exports to the US - firstly under the Generalised System of Preferences regime and more recently under the US-Bahrain FTA.

In recent years GPIC had been able to save substantial sums on custom duties and levies on its US shipments.

A large part of this amount had been used to support charitable and humanitarian activities across Bahrain and for the betterment of GPIC employees.-TradeArabia News Service