Optimize plant capacity

Optimization of capital-intensive projects, such as chemical commodities plants in countries with a large domestic market and without international competitive advantages, stirs up a unique question. Should the company invest more in excess production capacity to maintain or increase exports at low profit margins? This article proposes a skillful and quick method for estimating optimum plant capacity, which is a way to answer that question. To use the method, one must make an assumption. That is, we are dealing with commodity products, whose exports could be restarted after plant de-bottlenecking or expansion (if desirable).