Fertiglobe Brand Guidelines: ADNOC and OCI’s 2019 Nitrogen Venture, Now Majority ADNOC

Plants in Egypt, Algeria and Ruwais, joined in 2019.

Fertiglobe is a young name built on older plants. The company says it was formed in September 2019 as a strategic partnership between the Dutch-listed fertiliser group OCI and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC); the law firm Cleary Gottlieb, which advised OCI on the deal, describes it the same way in an October 2024 note. English Wikipedia’s ADNOC article puts it as a merger of ADNOC’s fertiliser business, established in 1980, with OCI’s Middle East nitrogen fertiliser business. Fertiglobe is headquartered in Abu Dhabi and incorporated in the Abu Dhabi Global Market, the emirate’s financial free zone.

The ADNOC side was Fertil, at Ruwais on the Arabian Gulf. The company says Fertil was set up in 1980 as a joint venture between ADNOC, with two thirds, and Total, with one third, and began producing ammonia and urea three years later, in 1983. A second line, Fertil-2, followed in 2013, and ADNOC bought out Total’s stake in 2018, making Fertil wholly ADNOC-owned before the merger.

The OCI side came from Egypt and Algeria. According to Fertiglobe’s own timeline, OCI’s first urea plant, EFC-1, near the port of Ain Sokhna on the Red Sea, began production in 2000, and EFC-2 in 2006. OCI entered the nitrogen business proper in 2005 by taking a 30% stake in Egypt Basic Industries Corporation (EBIC) and building its ammonia plant, took full ownership of Egyptian Fertilizers Company (EFC) in 2008, and saw EBIC begin production in 2009. In Algeria, the Sorfert plant started operating in 2013. By 2019, the company says, the OCI platform held all of EFC, 60% of EBIC and 51% of Sorfert Algérie.

Urea, ammonia and a fluid for diesel engines.

Fertiglobe’s business is nitrogen. The company describes four production facilities across the UAE, Egypt and Algeria. EFC and EBIC sit side by side in the Suez Industrial Development Company’s industrial park, with access to the ports of Ain Sokhna, Adabeya and Damietta. Sorfert is in the Arzew industrial complex in north-west Algeria, with export jetties at Arzew and Bethioua. Fertil sits inside ADNOC’s downstream complex in Al-Ruwais Industrial City, with its own urea ship loaders on a dedicated export jetty.

Its product list is short. Granular urea, a white solid fertiliser with a nitrogen content of about 46%, goes to farmers and to industry. Merchant ammonia is sold as a building block for industrial chemicals and nitrogen fertilisers, and also as a direct fertiliser. The third product is Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF), a urea solution used in diesel engines and sold as AdBlue in Europe; the company says it made trial shipments of DEF to Europe in 2022.

The company also presents itself as an early mover in what it calls renewable and low-carbon ammonia. It says it commissioned the first phase of a 100-megawatt green hydrogen plant at Ain Sokhna in 2022, that it is one of a few producers using hydrogen from electrolysis powered by renewable electricity at its Egyptian plants, and that in 2023 it shipped what it calls the world’s first ISCC PLUS-certified renewable ammonia. It also says it has shipped test cargoes of low-carbon ammonia from its UAE plants. These are the company’s descriptions.

Scale is what trade observers note. Cleary Gottlieb and the Middle East business weekly MEED both described Fertiglobe in October 2024 as the world’s largest seaborne exporter of urea and ammonia combined, and MEED reported that it exported to 53 countries. In 2025 the company added a downstream foothold in Australia, buying the distribution business of Wengfu Australia; the company now runs it as Fertiglobe Australia.

The category.

Fertiliser companies sell something most people never see up close: granules, prills and crystals that leave a mine or a chemical plant in bulk and end up spread across fields. Their visual language tries to bridge that distance. A familiar image is a handful of granules held in open palms, which turns a commodity into something a farmer can weigh and judge, and links the product to the people who use it.

The second register is the field. Corporate reports and websites in this sector lean on green crops, wide horizons and drone shots looking straight down on rows of maize, rice or vines. These images speak to growers and investors at once: they show the end use of the product, and they suggest scale without showing a single factory.

The third register is industrial. Open-pit mines, conveyor belts, evaporation ponds, acid plants and port terminals with ships at the quay appear alongside the fields, because extraction and logistics are the business. Packaging carries the brand into the farmyard: printed sacks and big bags, often with a crop icon, a nutrient formula and a product-range name on the front. Trade events such as the International Fertilizer Association’s Annual Conference add another stage, with stands, lanyards and presentation decks.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — when and where it was founded, who owns it, where it mines and makes its products, and how its name has changed — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. The palettes and typefaces shown here are our own unofficial interpretations, not official brand assets.

From a 2021 listing to a 2024 change of control.

Fertiglobe went public in October 2021 with a listing on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX). Cleary Gottlieb says it was the first company established in the Abu Dhabi Global Market to list on ADX. In the same year, the company says, it bought a further 15% of EBIC.

Control changed three years later. On 15 December 2023 ADNOC signed an agreement to buy OCI’s entire holding of 50% plus one share, and the deal closed on 15 October 2024, according to Cleary Gottlieb. ADNOC’s stake rose from 36.2% to 86.2%, MEED reported, with the remaining 13.8% still traded on ADX. ADNOC said at the time that the existing management team, led by chief executive Ahmed El-Hoshy, would stay in place, and that Fertiglobe would become “the platform” for its growth in fertiliser and low-carbon ammonia. MEED reported that ADNOC planned to transfer its stakes in low-carbon ammonia projects to the company, including a planned plant in the Taziz industrial zone at Ruwais being developed with South Korea’s GS Energy and Japan’s Mitsui.

Since then the company has set out what it calls its Grow 2030 strategy, announced in 2025, which it describes as a plan to become a globally integrated nitrogen business.

For a design guide, Fertiglobe shows how a joint venture of established plants can take on a single corporate name and then pass under one owner without changing it. Compare CF Industries, another nitrogen producer, and Yara, a fertiliser name born from Hydro. For this guide we use a gulf blue, a deep navy, white and a sand tone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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