(Reuters) - Incitec Pivot Ltd said on Tuesday it was informed that a key railway line in Queensland hit by flooding this month would reopen sometime between late April and mid-May and it expects losses from the outage in excess of A$100 million ($71.69 million).
Australia's largest fertiliser maker said the impact of the outages on the rail line, operated by Queensland Rail, would result in lost earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) of about A$100 million to A$120 million.
Incitec's update comes after Queensland Rail said on Monday that the 1,000-km (620-mile) rail line, which had disrupted zinc shipments from major producers such as Glencore , will be fixed sooner than it had expected.
The closure was caused by flooding that covered vast tracts of Queensland's outback earlier in February, killing hundreds of thousands of cattle and cutting off the region's mines and industrial producers.
Earlier this month, Incitec had flagged a weekly loss of about A$10 million to EBIT from the closure, but added in Tuesday's statement that the company had taken measures to mitigate the impact, including transporting some of its product by road.
(Reporting by Nikhil Kurian Nainan in Bengaluru; Editing by Dan Grebler)
