M&As: Shell completes sale of Singapore refinery to Chandra Asri-Glencore jv; Lanxess completes sale of urethane biz to Ube

Oil firm Shell has completed the sale of its Singapore refinery and refining assets to a Chandra Asri-Glencore joint venture, with new owners already started purchasing feedstock. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Last year, Shell announced the sale of its Bukom and Jurong islands facility, which dates back to 1961. The deal makes Indonesia-based Chandra Asri, the majority owner of the joint venture, one of Southeast Asia's largest petrochemicals players

Shell said that its staff at the site will remain with the new venture, Aster Chemicals and Energy Pte Ltd.

Chandra Asri has already made several open-spec naphtha purchases for Singapore arrivals starting in March as it took charge of Aster's petrochemicals feedstock procurement, according to several sources familiar with the matter.

Under Shell, the Jurong Island chemicals site imported around 1.5 million tonnes/year of naphtha in 2023 and 2024, shiptracking data from Kpler showed.

Meanwhile, Swiss trading giant Glencore has made several crude purchases for May and June arrival into Singapore, including from Canada and Kazakhstan, two sources familiar with the purchases said.

Canada-origin crude has rarely, if ever, previously been bound for Singapore, with no such volumes recorded in shiptracking data from Kpler and LSEG dating from 2013 and 2017, respectively.

Both Chandra Asri and Glencore did not immediately respond to a Reuters query for comment, while Shell said that the company had signed crude supply and products offtake agreements that will come into effect following the completion of the sale.

In other news, German specialty chemicals company Lanxess has completed the sale of its Urethane Systems business to Japanese UBE Corporation, which is a global manufacturer of chemical products and listed at the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

All relevant antitrust authorities had granted the necessary approvals for the transaction, which was announced in October 2024. With completion of this transaction, Lanxess has received gross cash proceeds of approximately EUR500 million. The enterprise value amounts to EUR460 million.

Lanxess intends to use the proceeds to redeem its EUR500 million benchmark bond which matures in May 2025. The leverage ratio (net financial debt / EBITDA pre) will be reduced to ~3x.

“With this sale, we conclude our portfolio transformation and at the same time achieve a substantial further reduction of net financial debt”, says Matthias Zachert, Chairman of the Board of Management of Lanxess AG.

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