The Vietnamese government has approved the implementation of a Chinese Taiwanese-invested project worth more than one billion U.S. dollars on laminating steel in the central region, a local official told Xinhua Thursday.

Under the project invested by Tycoons Worldwide Group of China's Taiwan, a steel plant with an annual processing capacity of five million tons of steel billets will be built in the Dung Quat Economic Zone in central Quang Ngai province in the 2006-2013 period, said Nguyen Trung, deputy head of the zone's management board.

In the first phase scheduled to complete in 2009, the group based in Thailand will invest 539 million dollars in a mill with an annual capacity of two million tons of steel billets, he said, adding that the second phase of the project will see another 500- million dollar investment in expanding the plant's annual capacity by three more million tons.

As much as 80 percent of the future plant's output will be earmarked for the domestic consumption, and the rest for export, Trung noted.

This is the second biggest project in the zone after a 2.5- billion dollar oil refinery, he said. Vietnam is building its first oil refinery with an annual processing capacity of 6.5 million tons, which is scheduled to go into operation in late 2008 or early 2009, meeting about 40 percent of the local demand for petroleum products.

Now, Vietnam has to import around 80 percent of materials for steel production and a large volume of finished steel, according to the country's General Statistics Office.

It spent more than 1.6 billion dollars on importing over 3.3 million tons of finished steel products, and materials for steel production in the first seven months of this year, up 3.9 percent in volume but down 10.1 percent in value over the same period last year.

Source: Xinhua