Boston, MA 01/29/2014 (wallstreetpr) – Anglo American plc (LON:AAL) reported 25% rise in fourth quarter production of Platinum after recent labor strikes. The company’s metal unit in South Africa has been disrupted due to labor hassles but has now recovered with an unexpected favorable turn of events.
Cut downs last year
Last year, Anglo American Platinum had shuttered shafts and cut down on jobs in South Africa as the biggest producer of the metal struggled to make profit. Pretoria based Kumba was seen making progress after a two week long strike in 2012 at the Sishen operation while the State’s largest mine for steel manufacturing ingredient showed adverse signs of exhaustion. In the fourth quarter of the year, Rustenburg, Amandelbult and Union enhanced average production by about 38% soon after they overcame the illegal sequence of industrial events.
Increased productions
The London based company said today that the total equivalent refined Platinum they extracted in a period of 3 months ended Dec 31 was 520,000 ounces. Compared to this, previous year’s output was 416,000 when the production was at a halt for as long as 8 weeks. Anglo American plc (LON:AAL) reported that at its Kumba Iron Ore unit, production had increased to 11.3 million metric tons. At the same time, Copper production had hit a record of 214,400 tons, which means a 24% rise in production than last year. Production of export metallurgical coal has surged up by 3% to 4.7 million tons. Also, the yield of the thermal variety for export has risen up from 7.9 million tons by almost 8%. Apart from this, the output of copper at the company’s Los Bronces unit in Chile increased to 110,000 tons, which makes a total 16% increase. And the country’s Collahausi mine increased its production levels to twice and has a total output of 64,800 tons. Anglo American plc (LON:AAL)’s diamond mines at De Beers also reported 13% jump accounting to 9.1 million carats output in the fourth quarter.
