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Bloomberg reports SA’s gold industry, once the world’s largest, faces an inevitable decline, according to the chairperson of the country’s biggest producer of the metal by market value.
Output will continue to shrink as miners chase ever-deeper ore bodies while struggling to keep costs down, said AngloGold Ashanti chairperson Sipho Pityana in an interview last week. “Gold is a sunset industry. It doesn’t matter what you do, it doesn’t matter how you do it, you are not going to be able to change that,” he observed. SA’s gold mines are the world’s deepest and among the most labour intensive. The country’s gold production dropped 16% in May from a year earlier, falling for an eighth straight month as aging infrastructure, depleted reserves and accidents raised costs and curbed output. Still, for producers that were able to mine safely, profitably and reward shareholders with returns, there might still be a future, Pityana said. Automation could offer the answer to mining super-deep reserves in the future, he opined. AngloGold gets about 13% of its output from SA, down from 43% in 2007.
- Read this report in full at Mining Weekly
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