67 WALL STREET, New York - April 15, 2013 - The Wall Street Transcript has just published its Metals and Mining Report offering a timely review of the sector to serious investors and industry executives. This special feature contains expert industry commentary through in-depth interviews with public company CEOs and Equity Analysts. The full issue is available by calling (212) 952-7433 or via The Wall Street Transcript Online.
Topics covered: Precious Metals, Global Iron Ore Production, Emerging Market Infrastructure Construction, Midcap and Small-Cap Consolidation Activity
Companies include: New Gold (NGD) and many more.
In the following excerpt from the Metals and Mining Report, the Executive Chairman and Director of New Gold Inc. (NGD) discusses company strategy and the outlook for this vital industry:
TWST: Do you think having copper and silver in the portfolio is advantageous?
Mr. Oliphant: We love both those metals, and they work very effectively for us. And what I mean by that is, if you look at how costs have done in our industry and you can see on our Web site, we actually have a graph comparing industry average cost to New Gold's costs. Our costs have actually been coming down as costs in our industry have been going up, and last year was our lowest-cost year we ever had. And one of the factors that contributes to that is the copper that we get out of initially just Peak, and now Peak and New Afton, and the silver largely from Cerro San Pedro. And what we find is that those metals move in tandem with our input cost. So we regard them as providing us with a natural economic hedge, and you can see that over the course of the past few years, it's been working beautifully, because copper tends to move in line with commodity currencies, because commodity currencies appreciate when commodities go up.
It also - copper is highly correlated to the price of oil. To give you an extreme example, when oil was $140 a barrel and copper was $4.50, when oil crashed down to $35 in 2008-2009 and copper went to $1.39, but then as oil moved back up towards $100, copper now is about $3.50. So they tend to move in tandem. So because of that, people often ask us, would you hedge Australian dollars, Canadian dollars, copper? But we find that this natural economic hedge works beautifully in the company.
TWST: Give us an idea of what your two development exploration projects, the Blackwater and El Morro, look like. Please describe the geography, cost of production. Are there any comparatives, and have you done any factoring to see what your costs might be?
For more of this interview and many others visit the Wall Street Transcript - a unique service for investors and industry researchers - providing fresh commentary and insight through verbatim interviews with CEOs, portfolio managers and research analysts. This special issue is available by calling (212) 952-7433 or via The Wall Street Transcript Online.
