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AngloGold seeking Ux business
David McKay
Posted: Mon, 06 Nov 2006
[miningmx.com] -- ANGLOGOLD Ashanti wants to further lift its exposure to the uranium price, a metal about which it is positive, said CEO Bobby Godsell. In its last financial year, uranium, silver and sulphuric acid accounted for 2.8% of AngloGold Ashanti’s turnover in its 2005 financial year, about R483m. It could become a more significant constituent.
In an interview with Moneyweb last week, Godsell said “We are looking for uranium production all over the world ... We are exposed to the metal, we would just love to be a lot more exposed.”
Quite what this means for AngloGold Ashanti remains ambiguous. Speaking to Miningmx, Shrinvasan Venkatakrishnan, AngloGold’s chief financial officer, said that acquisitions were a possibility. “A lot of our uranium growth is in-house. But we would look at opportunities if they came along,” he said.
AngloGold is currently hoping to
increase its uranium production by expanding a secondary processing plant between 30% and 40%. It processes uranium from the Kopanang and Great Noligwa mines in South Africa. Its Moab Khotsong mine is another source of South African uranium.
But it will not be lost on AngloGold that things could have been much different. This is because the Dominion mine, now owned by sxr Uranium One (Uranium One), was once part of the Afrikander Leases, a company AngloGold owned.
Meanwhile, plans hatched by Harmony Gold to turn a profit from the uranium reserves at its Randfontein mine, thought to contain a large uranium volumes, have been ditched, said CEO Bernard Swanepoel.
A fact-finding meeting with Uranium One didn’t come to much, he says. However, there could be a uranium processing ‘attachment’ to Harmony’s R1.2bn plans to retreat gold tailings at Randfontein, Swanepoel said.
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