Merseyside Project Essay

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Victoria Chemicals plc case Victora Chemicals is a manufacturing company specialized in polypropylene that once used to be the leader in this market. The firm has two different production facilities, one located in Rotterdam and the other one in Merseyside. In the last few years they lost this position, in fact their earnings per share fell by almost 30%.In order to recover the lost competitiveness they are evaluating two different mutually exclusive projects. The first one consists in improving the Merseyside plant production by renewing the antiquated plant design in order to increase the efficiency by reducing energy cost and increasing output. The project requires capital expenditure of GBP 12 Million. The second project is based on the introduction of a new technology in order to convert the production line from batch to continuous-flow. To do so they need to acquire a softwere which has had positive results in the produciton facility in Japan. The expenditure for this project would be GBP 10.5 millions over three years. The Merseyside Project Lucy Morris is the plant manager at the Merseyside plant and is the person who proposed the project. Morris wanted to improve the results of the plant by changing the plant design to lower the energy requirements and increase the output by 7%. Currently the production at Merseyside is 250 000 tons anually. The gross margin is also expected to increase from 11,5% to 12,5% as a result of the project. The project would shut down the production for 45 days while the renovations are implemented. The price of polypropylene is GBP675 per ton. The tax rate required for this analysis is 30%. New assets can be depreciated over 15 years on an accelerated basis. Due to the increased production the work-in-process inventory (WIP-inventory) would need to increase by 3.0% of cost of goods. The controller, Frank

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