Yara's new CEO says fertiliser maker to stick with M&A drive

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By Stine Jacobsen and Henrik Stolen

OSLO, Sept 9 (Reuters) - Norway's Yara will continue to seek mergers and acquisitions, new chief executive Svein Tore Holsether told Reuters on Wednesday in his first interview as head of the world's largest producer of nitrogen fertilisers.

"Yara has had an active role (in M&A) for many years and I don't see that changing," he said. "Yara will always look for profitable growth."

Falling crop prices and growth in global nitrogen fertiliser output has prompted in a string of recent deals among Yara's competitors, most notably CF Industries' $6 billion purchase of assets from Netherlands-based OCI.

Yara has done bolt-on deals and larger acquisitions, but talks last year to merge with CF Industries collapsed after the parties failed to agree on terms to create a company with an enterprise value approaching $30 billion.

Yara in February agreed with German chemicals firm BASF to invest in a $600 million plant in Texas and in July it sold a stake in British fertiliser maker GrowHow UK to CF for $580 million.

"I have registered that there has been quite a lot of activity on the M&A side. Most recently with CF and OCI. That shows that it's possible to do value-creating mergers in the industry," Holsether said.

He said it's easier to find bolt-on acquisitions in regions where the firm is already active and to invest more money in existing plants, than to do bigger deals.

Holsether was previously CEO of aluminium products group Sapa, a joint venture between Norsk Hydro and Orkla , two of Norway's biggest industrial firms.

Yara shares traded 1.0 percent higher by 1152 GMT and are up 7.7 percent year to date, giving the firm a market value of 97 billion Norwegian crowns ($11.74 billion).

($1 = 8.2608 Norwegian crowns) (Writing by Terje Solsvik; editing by Nerijus Adomaitis and Jason Neely)