#jiangxi copper

[jichanglulu]

Jiangxi Copper in Albania

Jiangxi Copper (江西铜业), China's largest copper smelter, has just paid $65m for half of Nesko, a Turkish company owned by Ekin Maden that operates copper mines in Albania as Beralb ShA.

[jichanglulu]

Greenland's deputy foreign minister in China

Greenland's deputy FM Kai Holm Andersen and Denmark's Arctic ambassador are ending a three-day visit to Beijing and Shanghai "to explore possibilities for more cooperation with China". Mr Andersen made all the right sounds about cooperation in all sort of areas, from culture and education to the presumably more pressing investment in natural resources, between two peoples with "the same ethnic roots".

Mr Andersen isn't featured often enough in Chinese media to have a stable Chinese name yet. There's still some hesitation between Antusheng 安徒生 (as in Hans Christian Andersen) and Andesen 安德森 (as in Chris Andersen).

He mentioned talks with two Chinese mining companies, one of them a copper miner from Jiangxi. Assuming he means Jiangxi Copper, the talking has been going on since 2009 and actual exploration activities started almost three years ago.

[jichanglulu]

no competition between SOEs for Las Bambas

The much anticipated showdown between the Chinese state's copper giants bidding for Glencore Xstrata's Las Bambas site in Peru won't be happening after all. Or the competition did take place, but in the form of lobbying within state structures. Unnamed sources quoted by Reuters say Chinalco, one of the two top contenders, will not bid for the project, leaving Minmetals as the front runner, presumably with the blessing of the National Development and Reform Commission. Jiangxi Copper, written about in this blog mostly because of their pioneering activities in Greenland, were at some point also said to be bidding for the Peruvian mine, but now it looks like competition between state-owned companies will be prevented. Talk has emerged today of a possible non-Chinese bid, by a group including Newmont and Canada's Teck Resources. The asset is being sold at all in order for Chinese regulators to approve the takeover of Xstrata by Glencore.

[jichanglulu]

Jiangxi Copper also bidding for Peru mine

Earlier reports made it unclear whether Jiangxi Copper, China's largest smelter of the metal, was still on the race to get hold of Glencore-Xstrata's Las Bambas asset in Peru, but Peruvian media now quote mining minister Merino as asserting that they are indeed bidding. This means no less than three Chinese state-owned miners (Chinalco and Minmetals being the other two) will be competing for the project, worth perhaps $6bn.

[jichanglulu]

Greenland minister visits Jiangxi Copper

Jens-Erik Kirkegaard, Greenland's minister of industry and minerals, met with Jiangxi Copper officials in Nanchang during a week-long China tour. He showered praise on the "effective and high technological level" he saw in the mines and smelting plants he visited in Jiangxi, of relevance to him because Jiangxi Copper has been involved in an exploration project near Carlsberg Fjord, eastern Greenland, since possibly 2009, the first by a Chinese company.

As it happens, Jiangxi Copper's involvement in the Greenland project was not exactly eagerly publicised, until relatively recently. Although talk about getting Jiangxi Copper on board was already going on in Chinese policy circles as early as 2009, Chinese participation in the project initially came through a mysterious company called Jiangxi Zhongrun. Its background was described to Chinese media as an "extremely sensitive" topic. To Greenlandic media, interviews were simply refused. Jiangxi Copper's participation eventually became publicly known, though largely unreported outside of China, as a company name mix-up continues to plague English and Danish-language sources to this day. An article of mine tells about Jiangxi Copper's Greenlandic adventure in some detail.

From Nanchang, Mr Kirkegaard went up to Tianjin, where he met his Chinese counterpart and sought to attract investors at a mining fair. He found some interest, but no concrete agreements. Specifically, a Chinese financer is being sought for another major project, the Isua iron mine, for which an exploitation permit has just been awarded to UK-based London Mining. There had been talks with potential Chinese financial backers in 2011 and 2012, but they didn't go very far and likely fell through after plans to import Chinese labour led to enough controversy to topple the government of the time.

Edit, Dec 5, 2014: I keep misspelling Mr Kirkegaard's name. Fixed now.