Bangladesh Chemical Industries Corporation (BCIC) will reach the break-even point in next two years.
"To improve financial capabilities and reduce the dependency on imported fertiliser, the state-owned BCIC has already taken various measures to boost up local production with installation of state-of-the-art technology in these units and reaching the break-even point is possible in just two years," BCIC chairman Haiul Quaium told the Financial Express (FE) in an exclusive interview recently.
He said they started construction works in building mega urea production base with the capacity of 1.0 million tonnes of fertiliser through merger of Ghorashal and Palash urea plants.
Simultaneously, development works are going on to upgrade Chhatak Cement Factory and Osmania Glass Factory and building silos for storing the inputs while more projects are coming up for Dhaka Leather Complex and Karnaphuli Paper Mills, he said.
He said the corporation often faces difficulties in making continuous production with the decades-old plants. It is one of the major reasons behind its financial woes.
At the same time, they started feasibility study to build another mega fertiliser unit in the country's northern region, he said.
Mr Quaium was the director (finance) at the corporation before taking charge of its chairman in early 2019 when almost all the fertiliser-producing units faced closure due to various factors.
Sharing his early days of the challenging tasks, he said there was possibility of supply crisis of fertiliser due to suspension of local production, which contributes a key portion to meet the annual demand worth 2.6 million tonnes.
With such unpleasant circumstances, the chairman said, they took quick measures to make the closed unit operational and boost import formalities to avoid any form of crisis in the peak and semi-peak seasons.
"There was no such crisis as farmers got the key agriculture input on time," he said.
He said BCIC is now getting return of the initiatives as production resumed at all the factories.
"Look at the production performance, we have more than 1.2 million tonnes of fertiliser in our stock till today (Thursday last), which is a record," he said.
Alongside taking measures to boost local production, the BCIC Chairman said they paid serious attention to be frugal in spending.
For example, the annual expenditure for transport reduced to Tk 25.5 million from Tk 28.5 million in just one year while stern measures were taken to prevent corruption, he said.
"We also launched internal investigations and punished the culprits before shifting the charges to the Anti Corruption Commission and some other steps are still going on," he said.
Responding to a question of record number of import (2.0 million tonees) in 2019, he said the corporation had no option as all the producing units were shut down due to gas shortage or technical glitch.
"But we resolved the problems. We might need to import from 0.5 to 0.7 million tonnes of fertiliser in upcoming two years because we have huge stock of the item," he said.
He said BCIC is regularly observing progress of the ongoing projects to avert project overrun as the country will be able to export fertiliser once the projects are done.
Regarding the suggestion placed by economists to privatise the state-owned loss-making enterprises, he said the government took measures to privatise some public entities few years ago but the result was not satisfactory.
"Privatisation is not the solution. The solution is how efficiently we can handle the operations and assets and ensure proper use of that," he said.
For example, the corporation without facing any trouble is implementing a mega project on Ghorashal-Palash production units because it had preserved land there, he said.
"We normally spend many valuable times in the process of land acquisition. If we have preserved land, we don't need to spoil time. I think attention should be given on preservation of land for future use," he added.
