Mining and Exploration

The $820 million purchase is to the benefit of both partners, with Rio Tinto looking to sell assets as part of a $5 billion cost-cutting plan and China Molybednum following the lead of other Chinese firms keen to buy resource assets as they look to serve domestic demand.

IMA stands for Innovative Mineral Analyzers and here is a company that does exactly what its name says. IMA is a technology front-runner in mining on-line analysis, and if that sounds dry, for mining companies concerned to occupy the critical space between metal prices and extraction costs material analysis can well be what decides viability. You can't plan based on what you don't know and IMA gives you the critical information often missing in mining; the value of the ore.

Based in Perth, Western Australia, and listed on the Australian Securities exchange (ASX), Continental Coal is a mining company with an Australian accent – which means it understands coal production and, even more importantly, the market that is blotting up most of the world’s coal and promises to do so for a long time. This is of course Asia, and notably China and India.

I was in 1902 that a mining engineer by the name of Georges Bia first opened up a sales office in Brussels. It is here that the routes of the BIA Group can be traced back to. Today, 113 years later, BIA exists as a leading international company in the field of machine distribution for the civil engineering and construction industries, with its head offices remaining in Belgium.

At the moment, though Devex has opened a few offices in other countries where clients have adopted its systems, it is firmly a Brazilian company, with 85 percent of its $35 million annual revenue generated domestically. However there is no better seed-bed for new technology than Brazil, and forward thinking global mining groups are now taking notice of Brazil not just as a country with huge resources to extract but as a developer of smart ways of doing that.

BHP said that production had jumped by nine percent to 187 million tonnes for the year to 30 June, news that analysts have reacted to by claiming it meant that the commodity giants were betting on continued strong demand from China, despite the country's economy seeing a slowdown in growth.

On March 1 this year ACCL International’s President, Haji Habibullah Pirzada, opened the company’s newly built headquarters in Kabul. ACCL is an Afghanistan-based company that makes use of its unique approach to partnership in a variety of post-conflict or underdeveloped regions worldwide to create wealth. It is a sign of the success of this unusual company that it had grown out of the premises it occupied since it was established in 2003.

Mwana Africa was founded by Kalaa Mpinga, a citizen of the DRC, a former senior executive of Bechtel, and a director of Anglo American before launching Mwana Africa Holdings in 2003. Two years later he and a group of partners across Africa were in a position to float Mwana Africa PLC on the prestigious AIM market of the London Stock Exchange.

Every person involved in gold mining or trading must have been shaken when the gold price slumped in mid April, so it’s reassuring to hear that one well-respected investor, the Canadian financier, Frank Giustra, said recently that he has complete faith in the continuation of the bull run. When it comes to investment Giustra has been so right for so long that it’s encouraging to know he is on Endeavour Mining’s Strategic Advisory Board.