Taipei - Taiwan's Formosa Plastics Corp has broken ground on a steel mill in Vietnam, which will become the world's sixth-largest when it launches full-scale operation, a newspaper said on Monday.

Formosa Plastics, Taiwan's largest petrochemical manufacturing conglomerate, held a ground-breaking ceremony for the steel mill on Sunday in Ha Tinh province, 340 kilometres south of Vietnamese capital Hanoi, the Economic Daily News reported.

Vietnam attaches great importance to the steel mill because it is the biggest single foreign investment in the communist state and accounts for half of Vietnam's inbound-investment in 2008, making Formosa Plastics Vietnam's top foreign investor.

Some 1,000 Vietnamese, including Premier Nguyen Tan Dung and two dozen officials, attended the ground-breaking ceremony.

The steel mill will be built in three stages. When the first stage, costing 8 billion US dollars, is finished later this year, the plant will produce 7.5 million tons of steel annually, the paper quoted Formosa Plastics Chairman Wang Wen-yuan as saying.

In the second stage, the output will double and in the third stage, expected to be finished in 2011, the annual output will reach 30 million tons, making it Asia's second-largest, and the world's sixth-largest steel project after the newly-formed Hebei Iron and Steel Corp whose annual output is 31.6 million tons.

Wang said Formosa Plastics plans to build a deep-water port on the Ha Tinh coast so that the company can ship steel-making equipment to the Vietnam plant.

Formosa Plastics' steel mill will need 40,000-50,000 workers, and it may hire workers from from China, Laos and Cambodia as Ha Tinh province has a small population, the Economic Daily News said.

At the ground-breaking ceremony, Premier Nguyen Tan Dung invited Formosa Plastics to build a petro-chemical complex in Vietnam.

Wang said Formosa Plastics is willing to make a feasibility study, provided that Vietnam has fully liberalized its policies regarding crude and crude products. (dpa)