(Yicai Global) June 20 — Shares in Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical slumped as much as 5.9 percent today after a huge fire erupted at a chemical refinery plant run by the unit of Chinese oil major Sinopec Group over the weekend, killing one person and injuring another. An investigation into the cause of the accident is ongoing.
Sinopec’s stock price [SHA:600688] was trading down 3.9 percent at CNY3.22 (USD0.48) as of 11:30 a.m. China time. Earlier in the day it sank to CNY3.15. The stock has lost more than 20 percent in value so far this year.
The fire started early in the morning of June 18 among the facility’s ethylene glycol equipment and quickly spread along the pipelines, Sinopec Shanghai said yesterday. The fire is now under control and controlled burning is being carried out of the residual materials from the pipelines.
The equipment which caught fire in Shanghai’s southwestern Jinshan district has an annual capacity of 255,000 tons of ethylene glycol. Last year its sales accounted for 1.1 percent of the company’s total revenue, it said.
Sinopec Shanghai logged a more-than-three-fold surge in profit in 2021 from a year earlier to CNY2 billion (USD298 million) while revenue jumped 19.5 percent to CNY89.3 billion (USD13.3 billion).
A fire rages at the Jinshan plant. The skyscrapers of Shanghai can be seen in the background.