Antam to increase the use of standby loans Bank Mandiri

PT Antam Tbk plans to increase the use of the standby loans available at state owned Bank Mandiri to cope with the increase in the amount of funds needed by the company to build its third ferronickel refinery plant, FeNi III, Koran Tempo reported on Monday.

President Director of PT Antam, Aditya Sumanagara, said that the company had so far only used a small part of the standby loans of about US$150 million allocated by the bank for operating activities and working capital.

"The remaining credit line at the bank will be used to partly finance the construction of the third ferronickel plant," he said.

According to Bank Mandiri's director, M. Sholeh Tarsip, Antam had so far used between US$30 million and $40 million of the standby loans available for the company.

Antam is currently building its third ferronickel plant to increase the company's processing capacity to 25,000 tons a year from about 11,000 tons at present.

The company earlier estimated that the cost for the construction of the FeNi III project would total about US$240 million because the captive power plant for the new ferronickel plant would be built by PLN's subsidiary Indonesia Power.

However, Indonesia Power later cancelled its plan and Antam should build the power plant with its own resource. This has caused a sharp increase in the budget needed for the construction of the FeNi III project to US$330 million. (*)