Global Mine* Bulletin - August 2008

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The global mining world looks quite different today than it did ayear ago. This is of course also true for the whole businessworld, however, we saw mining initially buck this trend. At themoment we seem to have rapidly moved to a state where theindustry is working at least on two levels – those with long life,low cost, existing operations and those that don’t.

It was with this backdrop that we recently released our flagship globalpublication, “Mine* – As good as it gets?” This document created significantglobal media interest, particularly around whether PwC were suggesting theend of the mining boom was nigh. This was not the case, as detailed further inour first article.

As you will note from our first article, the most significant industry issue aroundthe world is cost control. This is the focus of the Performance ImprovementCorner, covered in the second article. It is interesting to observe thecomments of my consulting experts as to how they see the significantdeterioration of the quality of mine effectiveness & efficiency. The hard earnedgains in the 1990’s have been diluted over the last 5 years in the rush to maximise quantity.

This edition of Global Mine* Bulletin has a strong Australia focus with thecountry focus talking about the proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Schemewhich will be a major challenge to the mining sector. We also take a look at“Aussie Mine”, a summary of the mid tier and junior Australian mining industrywhich was released in June. This was the third of the trilogy; following Juniormine publications covering Toronto and the London AIM market. As with theother publications, 2007 was a wonderful year, however, there can be littledoubt that 2008 will be far more testing.

I trust you will find this edition informative and useful, please feel free to passon any thoughts you might have for future editions to me.