Azerbaijan, Baku, Nov.30 /Trend F.Milad/
Foreign firms have invested some $1.3 billion in Iran's petrochemical industry in the past five years, Deputy Economic Minister Behrouz Alishiri said on Friday.
The figure accounts for 5 percent of Iran's total foreign investment, Alishiri said, the Mehr News Agency reported.
Iran needs to invest at least 20 million dollars to complete its petrochemical projects, the IRNA News Agency quoted Iran's Deputy Oil Minister Abdolhossein Bayat as saying on November 27.
Bayat said that Iran plans to increase petrochemical output by 5 million tons to 49 million tons in the current calendar year, which ends on March 20.
He added that nine petrochemical projects will be implemented in the current year which will boost the country's output by 5 million tons.
Iran hopes to implement 47 petrochemical projects by the end of the Fifth Five-Year Economic Development Plan in 2015, adding a total of 43 million tons per year to its capacity. Iran will represent at least 5.3 percent of global petrochemical output and 36 percent of Middle Eastern production once those projects come online.
The country's installed petrochemical production capacity is currently about 55 million tons.
Iran is the second biggest petrochemical producer in the Middle East after Saudi Arabia.
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