Two hundred and twenty-five thousand meters of stone export from the city of Mahalat
Secretary of Iran Stone Association: Two hundred and twenty-five thousand square meters of stone worth $ 2.7 million were exported from the city in the first half of this year.
According to Iran's International Stone Exhibition, Hussein Soroush said the processed exported cargoes of this city's stone have been exported to Armenia, Tajikistan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Azerbaijan and the Persian Gulf states.
He continued: Exports of neighborhood rock have increased by seven percent over the same period last year.
The secretary of the Iranian Stone Association expressed hope that the export growth of a building material would continue in the second half of this year because after the nuclear deal, Canada and the United States have also become customers of the city's neighborhood stone.
Soroush emphasized the importance of institutionalizing export culture among artisans and said that empowering Iranian businessmen should increase the share of half percent of Iranian stone exports to four to five percent.
He said: With the stagnation of the domestic market, the miners should not reduce production but should strive for export boom. Soroush described the formation of a specialized parent company for stone export in Mahallat and equipping stone processing workshops with state-of-the-art technology from export development guides.
He added: stone exports have a special standard, such as identifying target markets in terms of culture and type of consumption and looking at the rock face. Soroush said: In order to improve the quality of the processing products, consultations with Italy were carried out in Italy and in the near future the city would buy stone technology from the localities and foreign stone processing machinery factories would be set up in the localities.
He said: With the launch of these factories stone production from Mahallat city and processing of stone with modern technology and sale of stone is done by Italy and a major change in stone industry of Mahallat city will be achieved.
Soroush said: 1.5 million square meters of stone were processed in the first half of this year in two hundred and fifty local stone processing plants in Mahale.
He said the processing of two million and six hundred thousand square meters of ornamental stone is planned by the end of this year in the neighborhood workshops. The Travertine County White Rock Mining Reserve is estimated at 20 million tonnes, extracting two and a half million tonnes annually.
Mahalat city in the south of the central province is about five kilometers from Arak, a pole of stone, flower and vegetable production and ornamental fish in the country.
* IRNA
