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AngloGold Ashanti Ltd., the world’s third-largest gold miner, is under no pressure to sell assets and will only do so for “full value,” Chief Executive Officer Srinivasan Venkatakrishnan said.
The partial or full sale of one of the company’s key operating assets “is being looked at and progressed,” Venkatakrishnan said on a conference call on Monday. That’s part of the company’s plan to reduce net debt by about $1 billion, or a third of the total, over the medium term.
“What we are not going to be doing is a fire sale of assets,” he said. “The shop is closed for bargain hunters. If we don’t get full value we won’t sell, it’s as simple as that.”
AngloGold is trying to offer mines or share capital costs with accomplices in an offer to diminish its $3.1 billion of net debt, mostly collected amid the decade-long bull run in gold to 2011. The organization retired an arrangement to part its South African operations from its global resources in September when speculators including support stock investments tycoon John Paulson dismissed the extent of a going with $2 billion offer deal.
Venkatakrishnan said he wouldn’t be naming which assets could be sold because “these are operating mines and also there are various stakeholders involved.”
AngloGold is also seeking partners for its Obuasi mine in Ghana and Colombian exploration assets. AngloGold is gauging interest from other bullion producers and “non-conventional players” that want exposure to bullion “particularly given the uncertainty that still exists on how reliable the U.S. recovery is,” Venkatakrishnan said.
A sum of 50 deals totaling more than $2 billion were accounted for by private investments in the mining segment, as per investigation by law office Berwin Leighton Paisner discharged for this present month. Gold was the most mainstream for arrangement creators with an aggregate of 15 transactions completed. AngloGold made a headline loss, which excludes one-time items, of $71 million, or 17 cents a share, in the three months to Dec. 31, compared with a profit of $44 million, or 11 cents, in the previous quarter, the Johannesburg-based company said in a statement on Monday.
AngloGold incurred $147 million of costs relating to job cuts and other restructuring at Obuasi in the fourth quarter, it said. It had to pay $44 million related to accounting losses at the country’s biggest bullion-processing plant, Rand Refinery. Other gold producers also had to foot the bill for the losses at the facility.
Gold produced climbed 2 percent to 1.16 million ounces in the quarter, while all-in sustaining costs declined 2 percent to $1,017 an ounce. AngloGold’s net debt was $3.1 billion at the end of 2014, or 1.9 times profit before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. That is up from $2.95 billion toward the end of the second from last quarter and about the same as a year prior.
The shares climbed for the first time in five days, adding 1.1 percent to 138.27 rand by 9:10 a.m. in Johannesburg, extending the gain this year to 35 percent and making AngloGold the third-best performer on the 167-member FTSE/JSE Africa All Share Index in the period.
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