Al Khaleej sells white and raw sugar to India

Thursday, June 11, 2009

DUBAI: The UAE’s Al Khaleej Sugar has sold several thousand tonnes of sugar to India after the country’s output fell due to weather conditions, an executive said on Wednesday.

“We sold containers with a few thousand tonnes of raw and white sugar to India last month,” Cyrus Raja, corporate affairs general manager at Dubai-based refinery told Reuters.

He declined to give further details about prices or quantities that were shipped.

“Depending on India’s needs for white and raw we are considering selling more sugar to them, but still have no estimates of how much we will sell,” said Raja.

Due to less rain this year traders forecast a 45 per cent drop in India’s sugar output to 14.7 million tonnes in the crop year to September, which has turned the country from an exporting nation to an importing one.

The fall in cane output has caused New York-traded raw sugar to rise by more than 30 per cent this year, striking a near 3-year peak of 16.05 cents/lb two weeks ago.

Al Khaleej, one of the world’s largest sugar refineries had sold 100,000 tonnes of white sugar to Pakistan this month.

In May Pakistan had purchased 50,000 tonnes of white sugar from Al Khaleej for $494.40 a tonne, traders in Pakistan said.

Pakistan was expected to buy up to 600,000 metric tonnes of sugar this year as the subcontinent ramps up imports of the sweetener to keep down prices and avoid dipping into stocks.

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