December 04, 2008

Hunan Nonferrous may spend CNY 5 billion on acquisitions

Bloomberg reported that China’s biggest zinc and tungsten producer Hunan Nonferrous Metals Corp may spend as much as CNY 5 billion (USD 673 million) next year buying stakes in mining companies and mines in Australia and Canada.

Mr Zeng Shaoxiong vice GM of Hunan Nonferrous in an interview in Beijing said that "We are looking at three projects, mainly on base metals and hopefully we can finalize the investments next year." He did not name the targets.

Hong Kong listed Hunan Nonferrous plans to achieve sales of CNY 120 billion by 2015, a sevenfold gain from last year’s CNY 17.8 billion by expanding its smelting and processing business. He said it is targeting a pretax profit of CNY 13 billion then.

Hunan Non ferrous c in February won regulatory approval to invest USD 116 million in copper, cobalt, lead and nickel project with Australia’s Compass Resources NL. The two partners agreed to jointly develop the Browns Oxide base metal mine in Australia’s Northern Territory.