A ship carrying 30,000 tonnes of liquid ammonia left the Chinese city of Nanjing for Morocco on October 13, opening a direct maritime route for a raw material central to the Kingdom’s fertilizer industry, at a time when rising input costs and disrupted supply chains are putting pressure on phosphate producer OCP.
The vessel, Arlon, completed loading at Jiangsu Andefu Energy Supply Chain’s Nanjing terminal on October 10 before departing three days later, according to the company and Nanjing’s municipal transport authorities.
Its journey will take it across the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope to Morocco, covering more than 10,000 nautical miles. Neither the Moroccan customer nor the destination port has been identified.
The shipment marks Andefu’s first direct ammonia delivery to North Africa, rather than Morocco’s first purchase of Chinese ammonia. Chinese customs figures show Morocco received 51,050 tonnes in May alone, making it China’s largest export destination for the chemical that month.
In its financial statements, the OCP has previously detailed efforts to redirect ammonia purchases from markets east of the Suez Canal when supplies and prices became less favorable elsewhere.
Those pressures intensified in 2026 and OCP reported that geopolitical tensions and disruptions to raw-material shipments had pushed up both ammonia and sulfur prices, with the latter emerging as the more severe cost shock.
The group’s first-half revenue fell 7.3% to MAD 48.37 billion, while operating earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization declined to MAD 13.31 billion from MAD 18.61 billion a year earlier.
OCP responded partly by increasing production of triple superphosphate (TSP), which requires no ammonia, allowing it to reduce exposure to nitrogen input costs. TSP accounted for 35% of fertilizer export volumes in the first half of 2026, up from 26% a year earlier.
The Nanjing shipment arrives within that broader effort to secure industrial inputs while diversifying suppliers.
OCP is also pursuing a longer-term alternative to imported ammonia through its green investment program, which targets one million tonnes of annual domestic green ammonia production by 2027 and three million tonnes by 2032, using renewable energy to produce hydrogen and ultimately ammonia.
For now, however, the *Arlon* illustrates the distance between that ambition and the industry’s immediate needs: Morocco is developing its own production capacity while continuing to source ammonia from suppliers thousands of kilometers away.
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