Vedanta to exclude base metals business from sweeping demerger
The group said it will consider the base metals business demerger at a later stage.
Speaking at the Diggers & Dealers conference in Kalgoorlie Australia, Robert Friedland, executive chairman of Ivanhoe mines made big claims for the new mine his company is constructing in Mongolia together with major shareholder Rio Tinto.
Oyu Tolgoi is now one third complete and according to Friedland would have a life of more than a century. The mine is on track to produce more than 1.2 billion pounds of copper and 650,000 ounces of gold each year.
Oyu Tolgoi will also help turn Mongolia into the world’s fastest-growing economy with staggering GDP growth of 35%. Just to make sure no-one has any misconceptions of the grand scale of the project Friedland boasted that Oyu Tolgoi has 14,200 builders, easily overshadowing the largest construction project in the US, the new World Trade Center with only 2,300. And just to top things off he said Ivanhoe is worth at least double the $15.6 billion valuation the market is affording it at the moment.
The Australian quotes Friedland as saying the company is spending about $US75 per second in the development of the mine adding that this equated to about $US9 million ($8.3m) a day.
London South East reports Friedland believes the project is being undervalued: based on the 1.4 times net asset value that top gold miner Barrick Gold paid for copper miner Equinox Minerals earlier this year, Ivanhoe would be worth between $34 and $46 a share.
Ivanhoe last changed hands at $23.87 in early morning trade in Toronto on Wednesday. The stock has a market valuation of $15.6 billion and had been trading in a relatively narrow range this year with net gains in 2011 of just under 4%.
Image of the central heating plant of Oyu Tolgoi at night dated 29 July 2011 courtesy of the company.
5 Comments
Cop
Robert is American actually. What other facts did you get wrong.
MINING.com Editors
Cop, you’re right thanks for pointing that out. Robert Friedland was born in Chicago and grew up in the US, but he’s certainly more associated with Canada these days and apart from Mongolia his domicilium citandi et executandi is Vancouver BC . Here is fascinating (if rather old, dated 1996) profile on him by Maclean’s: http://bit.ly/q2Y0Dq
Golddigger469
and at the suggest Cu production rate of 1.4 Mlbs/year it will have a mine life of almost 60,000 years–good reporting here all the way around.
Golddigger469
Large, but Escondida produced 1.7 Blbs in 2010–it helps to be an o/p
Operator
operator:
this guy can only try to heat up the markets with all his stories as he is most likely looking for an exit from this project. after all – everything is done by Rio Tinto, so why they never boast about the stats this guy keeps making noise about as if he has much to do with what”s going on on the ground?