According to the data provided by Entente Capital Investment Company, the proceeds of UralPotassium JSC have gone down by 1% in the first three months of 2006, their EBIT by 12%, the pre-tax profit by 16%, the net profit by 11%. The prime cost of the company’s sales increased by 4%; all of these figures appear to be predictable as UralPotassium faced a number of problems selling its produce at the beginning of the year. Their important and large clients had a lot of potassium in stock, which let them stop buying potassium and strive for a good bargain on the future supply prices.

Yet UralPotassium as well as its partner BelarusPotassium refused to lower their prices and decreased the output by 20% as a result. The former reduced its production of potassium fertilizers by 21.1% (down to 617,000 tons) even though it had only planned to produce 10% less in the first quarter of 2006.