Canadian Barrick Gold Corp (TSX:ABX). took Thursday a fresh hit of US$8.7 billion, resulting in a second-quarter loss of $8.6 billion or $8.55 a share, leading the world’s top gold producer to significantly cut costs as well as its dividend.
As part of its second quarter results, the Toronto-based miner announced it was reducing its quarterly dividend to five cents per share and that would continue to cut down on both its workforce and capital spending.
The impairment charges logged today surpassed the company’s own expectations, as it had warned last month that it would take around $5.5 billion of charges on some of its assets, especially for its contentious gold-copper Pascua Lama mine, straddling the border of Chile and Argentina.
The overall write off included $5.1 billion related to Pascua Lama, $2.3 billion in goodwill impairments and $1.3 billion for other asset impairments.
With this Barrick has written off close to $13 billion so far this year and has pushed out into the future between $1.5 and $1.8 billion in planned expenditures.
Just as its gold peers, higher mine costs and lower commodity prices had hit Barrick’s results since late last year. But even before the bullion price debacle began, gold producers were facing challenges.
A recent PwC report shows that, from the 40 main mining groups by market capitalization, four of the five that lost most value in 2012 were gold producers. Along Barrick the other major casualties were AngloGold Ashanti (NYSE:AU), Goldcorp (TSX:G), and Newmont Mining (NYSE:NEM).
(Image of Chairman Peter Munk speaking during the annual general meeting of shareholders last year)
4 Comments
Daniel Miranda (ex Barrick)
Barrick derserves everything they get. Pascua Lama is the highest hardest largest mining project to be attempted in the last 20 years in one of the worst places on the planet with an owners project team that was staffed with the least experienced people that not a lot of money could buy. If the truth ever comes out about all of the bad decisions it will be come a text book case of everything you shouldnt do in project management and project execution.
kborgman
The mining industry as a whole has become bloated and mismanaged, look at how capital costs have exploded over the past years on almost every projects, for no other reason than bad management and inexperienced personnel
Scott yull
This is a joke – Larger mining companies with a free reign on expenditure. We supported Barrick Australia on the Pronto Xi software for many years until they decided to go with Oracle. The cost well who knows and is insignificant as talking billions but I would suggest that 20 – 30 million was wasted and now the mines are up for sale.
Snowy
Barrick need to stop exploiting cheap labor and get the expat national ratio right… stop pushing inexperienced cheap local labor into responsible areas with no accountability, at the expense of expats. No 3rd world country mining operation will function without experience and expertise which cannot be gained from Universities.
Cutting costs by removing expats is false economics. The decision makers need to listen and take note of the experience, expertise and wisdom around them and stick the basics of mining and their core function and objective of extracting ore and selling it. Sort out the politics before you dig and know your product (Copper)