Iran has exported $5.3bln worth of petrochemicals in the first five months of the current Iranian year (March 21-August 21), the country\'s oil ministry announced. According to a Tuesday report by the Iranian Oil Ministry website Shana the volume of Iran\'s petrochemical exports amounted to 7.3mln tons in the said period. Iran\'s annual petrochemical production capacity now stands at 54.4mln tons, and the country has produced 17mln tons of petrochemicals in the first five months of the Iranian calendar year, the report added. The National Iranian Petrochemical Company (NIPC) Managing-Director, Abdulhossein Bayat, last month predicted that the country\'s petrochemical production will reach 46mln tons by the end of the current Iranian year (March 2012). Bayat announced that the Islamic Republic exported about 7.3mln tons of different petrochemical products, worth $5.3 billion, during the said time span, adding that about 4.3 million tons of the country\'s total production were sold in domestic market. About 39.4 million tons of petrochemical products, worth $26.2 billion, have been exported since 2009, he added. Iran, the world\'s fifth largest oil producer, exported around 14mln tons of petrochemical products worth more than $12bln in 2010. In July, Bayat stressed that Iran plans to boost the volume of its petrochemical products by building dozens of production units across the country. The country inaugurated a number of giant petrochemical projects in Khuzestan province in Southwestern Iran in February in the presence of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. One of the projects was Amir Kabir Light Petrochemical Polyethylene worth $310 million with a production capacity of 300,000 tons a year. The project was completed at a time when foreign companies such as Siemens of Germany stopped cooperation in the project under the pretext of the sanctions imposed on Iran by the US and EU. The other petrochemical units included the light polyethylene of Amir Kabir Complex, part of phase 2 of Fajr Complex and the hard polystyrene unit of Tabriz Complex.