SOFIA (Bulgaria), June 27 (SeeNews) – OTZK, Bulgaria's second-largest zinc and lead smelter, has signed a contract with Finnish mining technology firm Outotec for upgrades, worth more than 25 million euro ($33.6 million), a senior company official said on Wednesday.
The upgrade should be completed by the beginning of 2009, Roberto Mladenov, executive director of Bulgarian metals group Intertrust, the majority owner of OTZK, told SeeNews.
Intertrust awarded last year an 11.5 million euro contract to Spanish company Asturiana de Zinc for an electrolysis unit, which will increase the zinc capacity of OTZK to 45,000 tonnes from the current 27,000 tonnes per year.
The holding company plans to invest a total of 98 million euro in OTZK by the end of 2010, when its lead output capacity will be 52% higher than the current one, at 50,000 tonnes per year.
OTZK expects its net profit to rise by nearly 31% to 20 million levs ($13.8 million/10.2 million euro) this year due to growing metal prices on global markets, the chairman of the smelter’s majority owner Intertrust Holding, Valentin Zahariev, said earlier this year.
Shares in OTZK ended 0.7% higher at 53.2 levs on volume of 128 shares on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange on Wednesday.
($ = 0.7437 euro)