Devaluation Help To Grassmere Salt Sales

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31576, 13 January 1968, Page 32

Devaluation Help To Grassmere Salt Sales

(New Zealand Press Association) BLENHEIM, January 12. Devaluation has helped Dominion Salt, Ltd. The salt from its Lake Grassmere solar works is now more competitive in price, compared with overseas salt.

Although it is too early yet to estimate the coming harvest—still more than a month away—the weather so far has been fairly co-operative and something similar to last season’s 55,000 tons is possible. “But,” the works manager (Mr C. R. Ball) said today, “anything can happen in January.”

The 500-ton trial shipment to the Neu- Zealand paper industry is considered a breakthrough for the company. Some 40,000 tons of refined salt are used by the paper industry, mostly imported from Britain and Australia. It is of a grade equivalent to table salt.

Dominion Salt believes it has captured the Australian share of the paper industry market. The area to be harvested this year is the same as last year—22o acres of crystallising ponds. As far as the weather is concerned, the works are in a more favourable position than at this time last year, when the harvest was a record.

Saving Dollars.—President Johnson yesterday directed the United States Foreign Aid Agency to cut its overseas dollar expenditures this year by at least $lOO million to help improve the American balance-of-payments deficit.— Austin (Texas), January 12.