Iranian urea blocked from MMTC India tender

Ahead of the 5 October urea purchasing tender, MMTC has published a new tender document addendum indicating that offers of Iranian urea, whether shipped directly or indirectly from Iran, will will not be acceptable. The move is expected to completely block offers of Iranian urea from tomorrow’s tender.

The addendum, published yesterday, states that “bids with open origin of goods are not acceptable.” Bidders are to state the origin of the goods being supplied in their technical bid with “bids offering material from countries of origin against which sanctions have been imposed / likely to be imposed, shall not be considered and price bids of such tenders shall not be opened”.

The addendum goes further than the original tender document, published 27 September, in which MMTC had stated that payments in respects of goods offered from sanctioned countries could not be guaranteed.

As noted in our earlier coverage, Iran supplied around 700,000t of granular urea under the 1 August tender and has been a major supplier to India for some time. With Iran blocked, India will now be more reliant on other origins. This at a time when fob prices in the Middle East and North Africa have advanced to over $330pt fob, up $25-30pt in less than two weeks.

The above article is based on coverage originally published via the Profercy Nitrogen Service.