The Vancouver Sun, a broadsheet daily paper first published in 1912, has the largest circulation in the province of British Columbia.
Canada’s mining sector is entering a period of “significant and sustained growth,” according to a recent report from the Mining Association of Canada (MAC), which will translate into the need to hire more than 100,000 additional workers in the next decade.
“Mining in Canada is playing a leading role in Canada’s economic recovery,” says Pierre Gratton, president and chief executive of MAC. “We are generating significant results, we are creating valuable new jobs and we are optimistic about the opportunities in the future.”
The association estimates that Canada’s mining industry plans to invest a further $139-billion in new projects nationwide in the next 10 years. “Working responsibly and co-operatively, we believe mining will be a good news story for Canada for years to come,” Gratton says.
Demand for commodities in countries such as China and India are driving part of the overall appetite for investment in Canada’s mining industry. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
Corporate takeovers in the metals industry are set to increase this year as companies scramble to fight rising costs and ensure access to key materials from iron ore to rare-earth minerals.
The value of mergers and acquisitions in the sector is on course to rise 23 per cent this year to about $83-billion (U.S.), according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.
The number of transactions is running near a record high, averaging more than two deals per business day in 2011.
Tie-ups are also increasingly crossing continents and industries, as highlighted by an agreement last year between Brazil’s Vale SA, the world’s largest iron-ore producer, and Norway’s Norsk Hydro ASA, a major aluminum company. Read the rest of this entry »
A critical or strategic material is a commodity whose lack of availability during a national emergency would seriously affect the economic, industrial, and defensive capability of a country.
The French Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières rates high tech metals as critical, or not, based on three criteria:
Possibility (or not) of substitution
Irreplaceable functionality
Potential supply risks
Demand is increasing for critical metals due to:
Economic growth of developing countries
Emergence of new technologies and products
Access to raw materials at competitive prices has become essential to the functioning of all industrialized economies. As we move forward developing and developed countries will, with their: Read the rest of this entry »
The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.
The operating environment might be rough, but the global mining industry remains optimistic that the commodity boom is going to run for years to come.
The annual Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) conference, the industry’s largest event, began Sunday in Toronto with a commodity outlook. A crowd of 28,000 to 30,000 people is expected to attend this year, the most ever.
The conference, which serves as a barometer for the mining industry, comes during a challenging period for most companies.
Producers are facing enormous cost escalation at their operations and development projects, while junior companies (which dominate the conference) are still struggling to raise money. Read the rest of this entry »
The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.
Exactly a decade ago, Don Coxe walked to the podium at the annual BMO Capital Markets mining conference and told dubious investors that a massive bull market in commodities was about to begin. The reaction was predictable.
“Nobody would speak to me at that time, because they thought I was stark raving mad,” Mr. Coxe, BMO’s strategy advisor, says today with a laugh.
The skepticism was understandable at that point, as commodities were still in a 20-year bear market that annihilated portfolios. Mr. Coxe, however, saw that something significant was happening in the developing world, particularly China. He was also delighted to see that everyone disagreed with him.
“I did some interviews with mining people and couldn’t find anyone who believed in the business. That was a requisite. Because it meant there would be no new capital spending for a few years [leading to supply shortages],” he says. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
Commodities are once again on a tear.
Gold has been surging, and is closing in on $1,800 (U.S.) an ounce. Crude oil is trading comfortably above $100 a barrel, and even better for commodity bulls, there is pain at the pumps for drivers, with gasoline prices in many parts of Canada around $1.30 a litre. Copper, the metal with a degree in economics, is within striking distance of $4 a pound. Corn, soybeans, wheat – practically everything in commodity land is enjoying buoyant prices.
Can these good times continue?
For answers, we turned to one of Canada’s best known commodity gurus, Donald Coxe, strategy adviser to Bank of Montreal. He is the guiding light behind two commodity-focused closed end funds that trade on the Toronto market, one specializing in agriculture, the other in a wider range of materials that also include precious metals, base metals and energy. Read the rest of this entry »
The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.
CALGARY—The head of the Royal Canadian Navy says Canada needs to bolster its military presence in the Arctic to prepare for a boom in human and economic activity resulting largely from climate change.
Global warming is thought to be occurring faster in the North than anywhere else. The gradual disappearance of sea ice is opening up commercial shipping as well as previously inaccessible areas rich with oil, natural gas and mineral resources.
“From a naval perspective, climate change probably means there will be more open water, so the Arctic Ocean will really emerge as the Arctic Ocean,” Vice-Admiral Paul Maddison, Commander of the Royal Canadian Navy, said in a recent interview.
“It also means . . . that the circumpolar route will probably open to international shipping from Asia to Europe sometime in this century — probably a lot earlier than most people predicted a few years ago,” he said. Read the rest of this entry »
How can the west stop poor nations being exploited for their natural wealth?
Imagine a small nation, undeveloped yet fantastically rich in a natural resource that offers it a one-off chance of great wealth. An aggressive, sophisticated foreign power wants that commodity and is prepared to do anything it can – diplomatic or military – to get it. What hope does the nation have? You wonder if Paul Collier’s new book has been timed as a tie-in with the DVD of Avatar, the story of a gentle planet that suffers “resource curse”.
Extractables are a curse: no poor nation in modern times (except, perhaps, Malaysia and Botswana) has prospered as a result of them. Many, from Sierra Leone to the Democratic Republic of Congo, have been repeatedly ravished over decades because of the wealth under their soil. And the reversal of this rule provides Collier’s central question: how are we to redirect the whole sorry story of mankind’s inequitable and short-sighted plundering of the planet’s resources?
Policymakers in development love Collier, because he offers routes out of ideological thickets. Read the rest of this entry »
Jim O’Neill, creator of the acronym BRICs 10 years ago, is positive on the prospects of the BRIC economies but also of other “growth” markets such as Turkey and Mexico. He talks to Tracy Corrigan, Editor-in-Chief of The Wall Street Journal Europe. (January 9, 2012)
Extracted from Jim O’Neill new book “The Growth Map Economic Opportunity in the BRICs and Beyond.”
After 10 years of emerging market growth it is time for a new world order – with the BRICs taking their rightful place at the top table , says economist Jim O’Neill in an extract from ‘The Growth Map: Economic Opportunity in the BRICs and Beyond’.
In 2001, I wrote a research paper in Goldman Sachs’s Global Economics series that examined the relationship between the world’s leading economies and some of the larger emerging market economies.
I thought the global economy in the coming decades would be propelled by the growth of four populous and economically ambitious countries: Brazil, Russia, India and China, and I coined the acronym BRIC from their initials to describe them. Read the rest of this entry »
NEW YORK — On a bitter evening in mid-January, a group of bankers and book publishers gathered on the 42nd floor of Goldman Sachs’s global headquarters here. The setting could not have been more New York — skyscrapers twinkled out the windows to the north and a jazz ensemble played softly in the corner. But the appetizers, reflecting the theme of the event, were an international mishmash: thumb-sized potato pancakes with sour cream and caviar, steaming Chinese dumplings, Indian samosas and Turkish kebabs.
The party was in honor of the Goldman thinker who had served notice to the Western investment community a decade ago that the world was being transformed by the rise of emerging markets, in particular, the four behemoths that Jim O’Neill, then chief economist at Goldman Sachs, dubbed the BRICs: Brazil, Russia, India and China.
In a new book that Mr. O’Neill has published, “The Growth Map: Economic Opportunity in the BRICs and Beyond,” he argued that the BRIC concept had “become the dominant story of our generation” and described the next 11 emerging markets that are joining the BRICs.
But there is another force that is reshaping the global economy today, and the Goldman executives who toasted Mr. O’Neill are a reflection of that: the rise, in the developed Western economies, of the “1 percent” and the creation of what many are calling a new gilded age. Read the rest of this entry »
As mining giants Xstrata PLC and Glencore International AG aim to pull off an industry-redefining merger, the deal’s fate depends largely on one investor: BlackRock Inc.
With a 5.8% stake, BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager, was Xstrata’s largest shareholder after Glencore as of Feb. 14, according to FactSet. Glencore itself owns 34% of Xstrata.
Under the deal’s current structure, three-quarters of Xstrata shareholders would need to bless the union, which would create a firm with a market capitalization of $90 billion. Given that Xstrata governance rules, intended to protect minority shareholders, bar Glencore from voting its stake, it would be blocked if just over 16% of Xstrata shares are voted against the deal. The fact that opposition from such a small group could nix the deal gives BlackRock tremendous influence.
That sway is only amplified by the fact that several investors have already indicated they will vote against the deal on its current terms. Read the rest of this entry »
How an American company is trying to break China’s monopoly on high-tech minerals.
FORTUNE – Few weekenders making the four-hour run from L.A. to Vegas notice the big mill works overlooking Interstate 15 at Mountain Pass Summit in California, near the Nevada line. Even fewer realize that the pale-pink buildings, gone patchy with age, are the focus of an extraordinary business drama that involves national security, China’s monopolizing the strategic market in rare-earth metals, and one company’s attempt to restore American preeminence in a crucial mining sector it once dominated.
Those sprawling buildings are owned by a Denver mining company called Molycorp (MCP), which is now spending nearly $1 billion to restart rare-earth-mineral production at Mountain Pass Summit and in the process revive a moribund U.S. industry. It won’t be easy. A decade ago the U.S. was the world’s biggest supplier of lanthanides, scandium, and other rare earths, and the Mountain Pass mine was the world’s largest producer of the minerals.
Rare-earth elements enable the creation of super-magnets, which operate at high temperatures and are also used for a range of high-tech applications, from missile-guidance systems to compact fluorescent light bulbs to wind power turbines to motors in electric vehicles. Read the rest of this entry »
Marilyn Scales is a field editor for the Canadian Mining Journal, Canada’s first mining publication. She is one of Canada’s most senior mining commentators.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s current trip to China is touted as an opportunity to create partnerships between the two countries. One positive outcome has just been revealed: Canaccord Financial of Toronto and a Chinese bank plan to establish a Canada-China Natural Resource Fund and give it an initial endowment of US$1 billion.
The fund intends to:
•Invest in both public and private natural resource and energy companies or projects in Canada;
•Promote interaction and sustainable development among Chinese, Canadian and other nature resources companies, and’
•Create opportunities for substantial returns on investment (be profitable) through the strategic and market-oriented allocation of the fund’s capital. Read the rest of this entry »
The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.
“Unhindered by the foreign funded environmental coalition
that is attempting to destroy a large part of Canada’s
economic future by preventing pipelines linked to Alberta’s
oil sands, the terminals at Darwin will collect gas
harvested from the Timor Sea and shipped via a 890-
kilometre underwater pipeline.”(Matthew Fisher-Nationa Post)
DARWIN, AUSTRALIA - Exports of iron ore, gold, bauxite and liquefied natural gas to Asia are fuelling a phenomenal wave of economic expansion for Australia.
Keeping accurate tabs on the number of mega-projects is as difficult as it is to figure out the exact size of its economy because it is expanding so quickly.
The iron ore industry is expected to increase exports five-fold by the end of the decade. Figures for the growth in gas exports are projected to be much bigger. The high price of gold has also been a boon.
While most of the West frets about tomorrow, at least $300 billion will be spent soon on mills, drilling rigs, pipelines, heavy machinery, port dredging, marine supply bases and railways for projects that have been approved for Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
The marine collection terminal that is the final link in one of the larger developments which got the green light last month – the $37-billion Ichthys natural gas field – will be built near Darwin Harbour. Read the rest of this entry »
After 20 years of negotiations, Canada and China are closer to ratification of a Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement that may benefit mining and mining services in both nations.
RENO - The Canada Mining Innovation Council applauded Wednesday’s announcement by Prime Minister Stephen Harper that Canada and China completed negotiations on a historic Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (FIPA).
Negotiations for this agreement took 18 years and major players in mining, manufacturing, and the financial sectors were consulted to get to this stage. Harper and Chinese Premier Wen Jaibao Wednesday signed a declaration of intent which must be legally reviewed and ratified by both governments.
If ratified, Canadian mining companies would enjoy more protection and promotion of their Chinese investments through legally-binding rights and obligation. Wen also called for studies into the feasibility of a free-trade agreement between China and Canada.
Jiang Shan, minister counselor from China’s Ministry of Commerce, told China Daily, “Chinese enterprises could make forays into or add investment in the categories of coal, iron ore and potash manure.” Read the rest of this entry »
