‘Supercycle’ fears hit mining groups – by Helen Thomas (Financial Times/CNN – August 28, 2012)

 http://edition.cnn.com/

(Financial Times) — Anglo American set the sombre tone. Falling prices and rising costs enfeebled the mining group’s businesses in the first half of the year, halving earnings.

First among its diversified cadre to report, the miner last month pruned its spending plans on high-profile growth projects. It is now — as earnings season approaches its conclusion — a familiar tale. The mining industry faces a number of negative factors that are squeezing earnings, curtailing cash flows and forcing management teams to make tougher choices.

The backdrop to the lacklustre results is the concern over whether the so-called “supercycle” is drawing to a close after years of surging Chinese demand combining with supply constraints from decades of under-investment to send prices higher for commodities such as copper, coal and iron ore.

BHP shelves Olympic Dam expansion The debate is crucial to mining companies and their investors. Over the long term, the performance of mining equities is largely correlated with commodity price fluctuations. Increases in costs, especially wages and payments to governments, tend to lag behind booming profits as prices rise, putting severe pressure on the sector’s profitability.

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China’s inventories pile up as demand flat-lines – by Carolynne Wheeler (Globe and Mail – September 3, 2012)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

BEIJING — You know it’s going to be a bad year for China’s exporters when all manner of goods – including the kitchen sinks – are gathering dust in storerooms.

“Of course [the slowdown] is affecting us,” Du Huayao, the manager at Foshan Nanhai Bigao Sanitary Ware Co. Ltd., which makes bathroom and kitchen fixtures, said in a telephone interview from his factory in Guangdong province.

“Sales this year from the foreign market have dropped from one-third to two-thirds.” Compounding Mr. Du’s woes is China’s slowing property market, which has pulled down his domestic sales as well. The company has already laid off 20 of its original 50 workers and has slowed production. “We don’t even have inventory built up now. Last year we did, but this year, the business was so bad that we dared not produce too much.”

As the country’s economic growth slows and its exports to North America and Europe drop off, inventories of everything from iron ore and copper to cars, liquor and designer goods are growing. Chinese exports grew just 1 per cent in July.

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South Africa withdraws murder charges against miners – for now – by Susan Njanji (Globe and Mail – September 2, 2012)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

PRETORIA – Agence France-Presse – South Africa said Sunday that controversial murder charges against 270 miners over the deaths of fellow workers shot by police, the worst such clash since the apartheid era, will be provisionally dropped.

Following a public furor, acting national director of prosecutions Nomgcobo Jiba, said that after having sought an explanation from the department’s lead prosecutors, she had taken the decision to review the charge.

“The murder charge against the current 270 suspects, which was provisional anyway, will be formally withdrawn provisionally in court on their next court appearance,” Ms. Jiba told reporters.

A final decision on the charges will be taken after a series of investigations into the shootings, hich left 34 dead and 78 wounded, are complete. They include a judicial commission of inquiry appointed by President Jacob Zuma, which has until January to present its findings. Thursday’s decision to charge the miners over the August 16 killings during a wildcat strike at the Lonmin PLC platinum mine had triggered outrage.

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Agency to advise on Northern policy – by Star Staff – (Sudbury Star – September 1, 2012)

 The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

Northerners got what they asked for in an institute to provide advice and ideas to the government of Ontario about how to improve the lives of people who live in Northern Ontario, says Rick Bartolucci.
 
Bartolucci announced Friday the launch of the Northern Policy Institute, an independent, not-for-profit organization to monitor how recommendations in the Growth Plan for Northern Ontario are implemented and to advise government on policies tailored to the special needs of the North.
 
The Northern Policy Institute’s two advisers — Laurentian University president Dominic Giroux and Brian Stevenson, president of Thunder Bay’s Lakehead University — will set out to appoint 10 members to serve as directors of the new think tank by October.
 
Bartolucci, who is also minister of Northern Development and Mines, said several organizations — including the Federation of Northern Ontario Municipalities and the Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association — called for the institute to be independent of government.

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Gina Rinehart: the Australian mining magnate at the top of the rich list – by Jonathan Pearlman (The Telegraph – August 31, 2012)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

The heiress and billionaire Gina Rinehart is not a woman to pick a fight with.

In the moments when she has not been battling her children over control of the family coffers, penning odes to mining or sponsoring national tours by climate change deniers, Gina Rinehart has spent the past year quietly tripling the size of her towering fortune.

The soft-spoken but notoriously steely Australian mining magnate earned more than £12 billion in the past 12 months – that is £32 million a day, or almost £400 a second. She has now acquired the title – which she would almost certainly shun – of the world’s richest woman. With a fortune estimated to be almost £20 billion, she has overtaken the previous richest woman, Christy Walton, of the American Wal-Mart retail dynasty, worth some £16 billion, and is on track to replace Mexico’s telecommunications mogul, Carlos Slim Helu (£44 billion), as the richest person in the world.

Though Mrs Rinehart, 58, avoids the limelight and long ago stopped doing media interviews, her strange antics and two spectacular family feuds – one with her stepmother, the other with her children – have ensured she has never been far from the public eye.

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