Africa

African Minerals has received notification from China’s Shandong Iron and Steel Group that the relevant approval has now been received regarding its proposed $1.5 billion investment in African Minerals’ Tonkolili iron ore project.

The approval came from the China National Development and Reform Committee (NDRC), and African Minerals is expecting the remaining government approvals to follow shortly. The closure date for the transaction has now been extended until the end of March 2012.

SABMiller has announced it will invest US$80 million into a new brewery at its Ugandan subsidiary, Nile Breweries (NBL), doubling the company's design capacity to 3.6 million hectolitres by 2013.

The new brewery will be constructed in Mbarara in western Uganda, the fastest-growing regional beer market in the country.

Davis Langdon is a specialist in the built environment, providing cost management and procurement for engineering projects in all sectors of the economy. Rooted in Africa, it uniquely understands the needs of the continent’s booming economies.

Alan Swaby talks to the CEO of a platinum mining project in the final phase of exploration waiting to hear exactly how deep he will have to go.

They say that one man’s meat is another man’s poison. In the case of Village Main Reef Limited, the saying would fit better the other way around; but it still portrays the company’s business model of finding projects that others no longer want and turning them around into profitable, saleable assets.

Michel Maalouf, managing director of Astera Engineering, talks to Jayne Alverca about the company’s exponential success within Africa’s fastest growing telecoms market.

Tullow Oil has signed two new production sharing agreements (PSAs) with the government of Uganda, paving the way for completion of its asset sale to France’s Total and China’s CNOOC.

The new PSAs cover the EA-1 and Kanywataba licences in the Lake Albert Rift Basin. Tullow has also been awarded the production licence for the Kingfisher field, which is estimated to hold around 300 million barrels of oil.

Pan African Resources and Wits Gold have joined forces to acquire the Evander Gold Mine from Harmony Gold for R1.7 billion.

The Evander operations are located in Mpumalanga, South Africa, and comprise the operating Evander 8 shaft and several significant development projects: Rolspruit, Poplar, Evander South, Libra and the Kinross metallurgical processing plant. Evander 8 currently has an expected life of mine of more than 10 years.

Alan Swaby talks to a South African mining software company that is resisting being pigeon-holed and, in the process, carving out a successful path for itself.

Is it a mining-savvy IT company or an IT-savvy mining company? At one time it might have been the first; but these days, MineRP is very much a rounded supplier of mining solutions and actually wants to get much rounder. 

Zimbabwe-based Meikles has spent three years rebuilding its retail, hotel and tea growing business in the aftermath of devastating hyperinflation. Executive director Mark Wood talks to Gay Sutton about new business opportunities and plans for growth.

Meikles is a household name in Zimbabwe: 17 Meikles-branded department stores and a luxury five-star Harare hotel form the face of a company that has extensive experience in retail, hospitality and agriculture dating back to 1892.

IPP Resources of Tanzania has a double distinction: not only is the company Tanzania’s largest diversified resources group, but also Tanzania’s only wholly indigenous mining and exploration entity.