[Canada] Mining: Miracle on the St. Lawrence – by Brian Dunn (Canadian Business Magazine – May 9, 2011)

Founded in 1928, Canadian Business is the longest-publishing business magazine in Canada.

Sept-Îles is booming, and the numbers are there to prove it. The mining community of 30,000 on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, some 960 kilometres from Montreal, added 5,200 new jobs last year, for an impressive 10.7% increase in employment, the best in Quebec. Based on its population, the 5,200 new jobs is equivalent to Montreal adding 105,000 new jobs, where only 30,000 were created last year.

A lot of the credit for this growth goes to Serge Lévesque, Sept-Îles mayor since November 2009. He knows the region lives or dies on the fortunes of the mining industry, having worked for both the Iron Ore Co. of Canada and Aluminerie Alouette Inc., a global aluminum industry leader.

In early April, Russian steelmaker OAO Severstal and its South African partner, Iron Mineral Beneficiation Services Pty. Ltd. (IMBS) announced they were conducting a feasibility study for the construction of a $1-billion iron-ore processing plant in Sept-Îles that could create up to 500 new jobs in the area.

Read more

India vies with China for influence in Africa – by Geoffrey York (Globe and Mail – May 23, 2011)

 The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous impact and influence on Canada’s political and business elite as well as the rest of the country’s print, radio and television media.

The latest global scramble for Africa, with China now in the lead, is escalating to new heights this week as India sends a planeload of gift-bearing political leaders to Africa in an effort to compete with Beijing’s fast-growing influence.

It would have been unthinkable a decade ago, but China and India are now emerging as key players in the African game, and both are boosting their presence so swiftly that they are becoming major competitors of the Western nations that traditionally dominated the continent.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, accompanied by dozens of business executives and cabinet ministers, is arriving in Ethiopia this week for an Africa-India summit on a scale rivalling China’s recent summits with African leaders.

Read more

Codelco Waning Copper Pressures $17.5 Billion Bet to Catch Boom – by Matt Craze (Bloomberg Markets Magazine – May 2011)

Bloomberg Markets magazine brings the inside view of professional investing with unparalleled access to the most influential people in global business and finance.

(Bloomberg) — Diego Hernandez, chief executive officer of Codelco, talks with Bloomberg’s Matthew Craze about the company’s financing plans and the outlook for the copper market. The world’s largest copper producer, may seek bank loans to raise the $600 million it needs to finance expansions at its Chilean copper mines this year, Hernandez said. (Source: Bloomberg)

Andres Avendano steps out of his Toyota Hilux pickup halfway down a 20-kilometer-long tunnel under Chile’s Chuquicamata copper mine. He lifts a cylindrical chunk of rock from the diamond-bit-studded drilling machine that extracted the sample.

“The copper is quite disseminated,” Avendano says, adjusting the light from his white hard hat to identify a sprinkling of gold-colored specks. In the mine’s early days, a similar specimen would have been brimming with the metal, he says.

Avendano, 33, who is in charge of mine design, and geologists from government-owned copper giant Codelco are searching around the clock for new deposits at Chuquicamata, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its June issue. The complex, 1,650 kilometers (1,025 miles) north of Santiago in the Atacama Desert, is so massive the open pit is visible from space.

Read more