CPF to build aquafeed mill in India
Charoen Pokphand Foods (CPF) is to build an 80 thousand tonne per year shrimp feed mill on India's west coast. Construction on the facility will start this year and will be commissioned in 2009.
The US$10 million feed mill is CP's third in the country and will boost feed production to 250,000 tonnes.
The Bangkok Post reports that Pong Visedpaitoon, chief operating officer of CPF, said that the investment expansion was part of the group's five-billion-baht overseas investment budget for this year, which also includes new projects in Russia, Malaysia, and the Philippines for both the livestock and marine sectors.
CPF was also said to be upbeat about the aquaculture business in the Philippines, the last Asian country that CPF invested in in 2003. It sells about 5,000 tonnes of shrimp feed a year in the country and the volume is expected to rise to 10,000 tonnes this year. According to Mr Pong, a boom in shrimp farming in the Philippines has led the company to build a shrimp-feed manufacturing plant sometime this year in Cebu at a cost of $10 million.
Fish farming on the islands is also booming, the newspaper reports, with high consumption of 30 kilogrammes per year per head on average. The statistics have caused the company to consider a new investment to produce fish feed, expected in Luzon this year at the same budget.
