[miningmx.com] – SIBANYE Gold declined to comment on speculation it intended to cut 2,500 jobs at a section of its Cooke operation bought from Gold One for R1.2bn in shares.
“I’m afraid I can’t comment,” said James Wellsted, head of corporate affairs at Sibanye Gold. An e-mail to Miningmx claimed that the company planned to cut jobs at its Cooke 4 facility. Reuters also reported on the potential job cuts.
Sibanye Gold included one month of production from Cooke, west of Johannesburg, in its June quarter results saying the operations had produced a profit of R300,000 against total revenue of R280.5m.
“We are surprised … Cook 4 has been one of their [Sibanye’s] best performing operation[s]. We do not understand why they want to retrench,” a source told Miningmx via e-mail, asking for anonymity.
Cooke 4, formerly Ezulwini, includes the uranium plant from which Sibanye Gold aims to establish uranium oxide production of about 600,000 pounds a year by end-2016. But it also produces gold from an underground orebody heavily affected by industrial action in 2012, according to Sibanye Gold’s website.
Based on forecasts in the gold firm’s June quarter presentation, Cooke 4 is worth about 40,000 ounces of gold production compared to 200,000 to 250,000 oz/year that would be produced from Cooke 1-3 shafts.
Whereas Cooke 1-3 shafts are estimated to produce 200,000 oz/year well into 2018 to 2019, production from Cooke 4 is forecast to have ceased by then. It’s possible, if the speculation is true, that Sibanye Gold may just keep the plant open and cut gold output in order to bring Cooke’s overall costs down.
The Cooke operations have gold reserves of 2.8 million ounces and resources of 22.65 million ounces – enough to sustain operations for 13 years.
They also include surface operations which are building up to 400,000 tonnes a month of tailings and that could be combined with Sibanye Gold’s West Rand Tailings Re-treatment Project.
