SINGAPORE, Nov 4 (Reuters) - Azerbaijan's state oil company Socar plans to take a 'substantial' stake in an Italian oil refinery next year and aims to raise the proportion of term exports of Azeri Light crude to Asia, its chief executive said on Wednesday.

The moves signal Socar's aim to secure outlets for its crude production, and came a month after the company said it was in talks to buy a controlling stake in Ukraine's third-largest refinery by capacity and to build new units.

'We have the appetite and we are working extensively on the investments,' Valery Golovushkin, chief executive of Socar Trading SA, told reporters on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Petroleum Conference (APPEC).

'We will like to get refineries outside Azerbaijan. It's from the risk management point of view,' he added, without revealing the name of the refinery in Italy, or the investment value.

Golovushkin also said Socar would raise the level of Azeri Light crude exports under term contracts to 80-85 percent of its total shipments to Asia in 2010, versus 60 percent this year.

Its overall exports to this region will will stay at 5 million to 6 million barrels a month, of its monthly global sales of Azeri Light at around 25 million barrels, he added. The rest go to the United States and Europe.

'Asia is a good market for us,' he said.

Socar Trading opened an office in Singapore last year, making it one of the latest newcomers in the city-state, aimed at securing term contracts for its crude, Golovushkin had said.

Socar Trading, a unit of state oil giant Socar, opened its first office in Geneva last year targeted at the European market, and is now looking for Asian term customers, he had said.

Golovushkin said on Wednesday that Socar, which now has two crude oil traders in Singapore, aims to hire more. 'We are looking for quality traders,' he said, without revealing how many more the firm is looking for.

The Kherson refinery, one of six in Ukraine, has been out of operation and later working at a much reduced capacity since 2005 when the current owners, the Continium group of Ukrainian companies, decided to modernise it.

The Continium group's owner had previously said the refinery was seeking partners and would be able to process about 7.1 million tonnes of crude after completion of a modernisation project at a cost of about $700 million-800 million.

The head of another large Ukrainian refinery, Kremenchug, had also said Socar had agreed to supply it with 240,000 tonnes of Azeri Light crude a month..

(Reporting by Judy Hua and Felicia Loo, writing by Ramthan Hussain; Editing by Clarence Fernandez; Tel: +65 6870 3824) Keywords: CRUDE SOCAR/TERM EXPORTS

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