RPT-Indonesia's Astra Agro plans to expand plantations

(Repeats to more subscribers)

JAKARTA, Feb 1 (Reuters) - PT Astra Agro Lestari Tbk (AALI.JK), Indonesia's largest listed plantation firm, expects to spend 1.5 trillion rupiah ($162.3 million) this year on expanding its plantations, a senior company official said on Friday.

Tjahyo Dwi Ariantono, Astra Agro's investor relations officer, said most of the spending would be funded by the company's own funds.

He said the company plans to increase its planted area by around 60,000 hectares by the end of 2009 and hopes to increase the size of its land bank by 200,000 hectares.

The company has more than 235,000 hectares of land in Sumatra and Kalimantan, mostly planted with palm oil.

He declined to reveal the cost of land acquisition, but said in the past it had cost around 6 million rupiah an hectare to acquire land and licences.

Astra Agro, controlled by the country's largest automotive distributor, PT Astra International (ASII.JK), expects its crude palm oil production to increase by 7.5 percent this year to 990,000 tonnes on hopes of good weather.

Last year the company, which has a market capitalisation of $5.12 billion, produced 920,600 tonnes of CPO last year, up from 917,900 tonnes in 2006.

Like many palm oil plantation companies in the region, Astra Agro is riding an increase in prices of global palm oil KPOc3 due to demand from the biofuel industry. Prices hit a record of 3,420 ringgit a tonne earlier this month.

Indonesia is the largest palm oil producer, after overtaking Malaysia last year, with an output of between 17.0-17.2 million tonnes. ($1=9,244 rupiah) (Reporting by Harry Suhartono, editing by Sugita Katyal and Louise Heavens)