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Two Qatari companies agreed to pay about $5 billion for a 49 percent stake in Shandong Dongming Petrochemical Group to help the Chinese business build an LNG receiving terminal and expand into retail gasoline sales.
The investment by Hamad bin Suhaim Enterprises and Qatra for Investment and Development will pay for the construction of a receiving terminal for liquefied natural gas, with a capacity of 3 million metric tons a year, and an LNG storage facility, Ibrahim El-Tinay, Qatra’s chief executive officer, told reporters Monday in the Qatari capital Doha. Shandong Dongming will also use the money to built 1,000 gasoline filling stations in six provinces south of Beijing, he said.
“We hired a financial adviser and expect to close the deal before the end of the year,” El-Tinay said, declining to identify the adviser. Shandong Dongming plans to select operators for the gas stations in the fourth quarter, he said.
Qatar, an OPEC member and the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied gas, has been expanding investments in China and Asia, where it already sells most of its oil and LNG. The emirate and its sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority, plan to invest as much as $20 billion in Asia by 2020. China is the world’s largest energy consumer.
Shandong Dongming, which operates an oil refinery processing as much as 450,000 barrels a day, expects to sell about a third of its output through the new gas-station network, the company said in a joint statement with the Qatari investors. It generated an operating income of $7.5 billion in 2013, according to the statement.
Source: Bloomberg
