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Agence France Presse

SINGAPORE, 13 August 2002 -- A Singapore company that recycles waste from the electronics industry to recover gold and other precious metals expressed optimism Tuesday about its profit prospects. Citiraya Industries Ltd., which was recently listed in Singapore and is planning to list in the US and expand operations to Europe, said it was likely to exceed its projected net profit target of 11.5 million Singapore dollars (6.7 million US) this year due to new orders. "The forecast that we gave this year... was based on the contracts on hand and not based on contracts that are new, so any of these new contracts will be a bonus to us in terms of impact on our earnings," Citiraya chairman Michael Lim said in an interview with AFX-Asia, the financial news subsidiary of AFP. Citiraya, founded in 1988, recycles and processes waste from discarded computers and chips to recover precious metals such as gold. Computer chips and motherboards are plated with gold and copper which are then melted and separated. Citiraya plans to expand to recycle precious metals from chips in used mobile phones and has started processing toxic chemical waste that contains precious metals. Recently, the company announced it has secured a new contract to collect electronics waste from ST Microelectronics and Lim said more deals are under negotiations. Excluding the new deals, Lim said the company is on track to meet its net profit forecast this year of 11.5 million dollars from 2.4 million dollars in 2001. Citiraya founders Ng Teck Lee and Ng Ah Hua Raymond began the business fourteen years ago by purchasing electronics scrap from multinational companies and selling them to an overseas buyer for processing and recycling. This proved profitable and they soon established their own recycling business, eventually designing their own plant and building a 40 million dollar facility in Singapore. Citiraya also has a recycling facility in Taiwan through its 22.5 percent stake in Citiraya (Taiwan). Lim said the company intends to increase its scrap collection centres and build three more recycling plants in Taiwan, China and Malaysia. It is considering to build a similar facility in Europe within two to three years, Lim added.

Citiraya shares were trading at 0.495 dollar late Tuesday, nearly double its initial public offering price of 0.250 dollar on July 31. Despite Citiraya's success, Lim said it has barely scratched the surface of a potential gold mine buried under tonnes of electronic waste from factories worldwide. "We are now mainly in 3.0 percent of the business (and) this is the waste generated by the electronics factories. The bigger volume out there is the consumer electronics waste, that is about 97 percent of the business," Lim said.