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THE STEPPES of southern Kazakhstan are home to the ancient highways along the fabled Silk Road. Today, caravans of 4WDs emblazoned with the logo of corporate mineral giants – BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Ivanhoe Mines – traverse the landscape in search of mineral wealth. Kentor Gold, an Australian junior explorer, fervently hopes that the road to a new mineral province leads to Khantau in the Zhambyl Oblast of Kazakhstan.
Quote of the Week"One thing that I find quite amazing is the way the ‘analysis’ and ‘market commentary’ blows with the prevailing sentiment breeze. I have a bamboo tree at home that holds up better than most commentary in the face of a southerly!" - Southern Cross Equities
NEWCREST Mining’s Ian Smith believes the gold price used in reserve and resource calculations will be an increasingly significant issue for the industry, with inflationary cost pressures and potential vulnerability to M&A the key impacting factors.
MARKET downturns invariably draw out the vultures and one of the more corporately aggressive global mining companies of recent years is led by an African expat executive with an MBA from Harvard, who reportedly once had designs on the top job at MIM Holdings and who was known in some quarters at that time by the nickname of “the refrigerator salesman”.
WHEN money talks, politicians listen... in the end. This is borne out by taking a look at the way successive UK political parties have given honours to donors to party funds.
OZ MINERALS remains confident on the zinc price and it won’t be upsetting the apple cart in terms of majors cutting back on greenfields exploration, with the company currently in the process of paring back various early stage targets that made up the portfolios of Zinifex and Oxiana prior to merger.
SINCE she first flicked the initiation switch to set off a shaft blast, Kate Sommerville has been hooked on mining engineering. Now a principal mining engineer with BHP Billiton, Kate Sommerville wants to “make a difference” in the industry, starting with helping to modernise its image.
READER Simon Hicks draws our attention to a news report on a new 800mw solar power facility in California.
SRK Consulting has confirmed a better than expected initial indicated and inferred resource for Pebble Creek Mining Ltd’s Askot polymetallic sulphide deposit in Uttarakhand, northern India.
PANAUST has hit the one million gold ounce milestone at Ban Houayxai in Laos, and while the grade won’t set the world alight, indications are that the potential project does have some important factors in its favour.
OZ MINERALS is getting off to an inauspicious start with analysts, while for those that like their sleuthing there are confusing signals as to whether the company is getting close to an M&A deal.
BACK in the earliest days of the mining boom, the first question asked by a sceptical and battle-scarred public coming to terms with the industry’s revival was, “when will it end?”. Back then, the arbitrary date picked by those who wanted to sound like an expert but had no empirical evidence on which to base their view on picked the Beijing Olympics.
IT’S often said you can tell you’re in boom times when miners start concentrating on specialty metals such as molybdenum and tungsten. If that’s the case, what does it say about long-term mineral demand when the opportunities for recycling specialty metals start to grow?
ROBERT Friedland with his new Australian scrip in hand and a smorgasbord of Australian companies suffering decimated share prices looks a recipe for M&A action. Two Cloncurry copper contenders stand out as possible target, though neither professes any great concern at the prospect.
NICE results, shame about the market. A catchcry no doubt for a few companies of late, and Castle Minerals is definitely one. The Ghana gold explorer has enjoyed promising success at two projects in the past couple of months, but with buyers on strike, it seems you could just about discover a new mine at the moment and investors would turn their faces away.
WORD has it that Sacha Baron Cohen and his team randomly chose Kazakhstan as the birthplace of the comic character Borat because, as one of the hit movie’s producers said, they "thought it would not be that easy to check up about”. That view could now be changing, which is to the advantage of companies such as Central Asia Resources.
WHO are three people who have influenced you/your career?
A LONG time ago in a galaxy far, far away ... Actually it was this week in Queensland, but let’s not quibble about the detail. No-one else is.
THE core messages delivered by BHP Billiton chief Marius Kloppers with the resource giant’s record 2008 fiscal-year profit echoed those conveyed by former Canadian high ambassador to China and now Beijing-based investment banker and advisor, Howard Balloch, on his recent return to Australia after a four year absence.
PLATINUM has been given big wraps by Brian Gilbertson, while Goldman Sachs JBWere has gone cold on gold just as reports appear that Central Banks will be selling less of the yellow metal in these uncertain economic times.
