Tag: NCM

Newcrest Mining (NCM) shares took a hammering yesterday as the country’s biggest gold miner revealed a surprising second multi-billion dollar writedown in nearly 13-months.

Five years of market reporting and disclosures by gold miner Newcrest Mining (NCM) will be probed in court if a class action launched by a listed law company makes it to court.

Gold continues to face an uncertain outlook, according to the latest survey from Reuters/GFMS, a forecast that goes some way to explaining the thinking behind the attempts by Newmont and Barrick to merge to produce the world’s biggest gold miner in a $US33 billion deal.

Gold prices might have topped $US1,300 an ounce mark for the first time in more than three months overnight Thursday, but that rebound won’t help erase the flood of red ink from some of the world’s biggest miners which started flowing this week.

So can you trust Newcrest Mining (NCM), the perennial underachiever of Australian mining, no make it Australian investing, since it took over Lihir several years ago?

Newcrest Mining’s (NCM) $6 billion plus of write-downs and losses this year saw a board and management clean out yesterday as the company seeks to put behind it years of dud investments, missed production guidance and falling profits.

Don Mercer, the chairman of struggling gold miner Newcrest (NCM), has strongly defended the company’s performance in his chairman’s comments in the 2012-13 annual report released yesterday, and made it clear that senior executives face the prospect of receiving lower bonuses and other incentive payments this year.

The bad news keeps on coming for Newcrest Mining (NCM), but the market ignored the latest bout yesterday.

More poor news from the mining sector.

We are about to enter the reporting season (yearly, quarterly, half yearly) for the world’s major miners, including gold producers who will prove to be the source of much angst and financial pain for investors large and small.

It’s no wonder that Newcrest Mining (NCM) is worried that corporate regulators, led by ASIC, are going to find something amiss with its continuous disclosure regime after the kerfuffle over whether the company did signal to analysts and some others that there was going to be a downgrade and asset impairments – news that wasn’t freely available to the market ahead of its release nearly three weeks ago.

If the stock market act is any guide (and it was last week), then the selling wave that has overwhelmed Newcrest Mining seems to be ending.

The events last week at Newcrest Mining will be centre stage today as investors wait for any sign that the market regulator ASIC is going to do more than just talk about the events of last week that saw the company’s shares plunge 21%, including on Friday when the company cut its final dividend, announced more cost cutting and plans to cut its asset values by up to $6 billion.

If the weakening gold price and production problems at some of its mines were not enough, Newcrest (NCM), the country’s biggest gold miner, now faces a serious legal situation that could threaten its hold on its huge, $2 billion Cadia mine in central Western NSW.

Investors and company management quite often ignore the most telling factor in investment success and that is the ability of those very same managers (which include the company boards) to extract value for shareholders, employees, the community generally and of course for themselves.

As expected Newcrest Mining boosted full year profit by a big margin in the wake of the last year’s takeover of Lihir Gold and its 1 million ounces a year of production.

Newcrest Mining, the country’s biggest gold miner (and Number 4 in the world) has flexed its muscles and expanded its domination of the local industry.

Newcrest Mining has downgraded its full-year gold production guidance following a 16% fall in production in the first quarter of calendar 2011 (the third quarter of its financial year).

A rising commodity price does wonders to the outlook for producers, be they iron ore producers, gold miners or copper companies.

Less than a day later the kneejerk reaction by some investors in selling their mining shares was exposed as short-sighted by the $9.5 billion reworked agreed merger between Newcrest and Lihir Gold.

Just as the smaller Kagara Ltd suffered on Wednesday and again yesterday from reporting unexpectedly poor profit figures in a quarterly report, major gold miner, Newcrest Mining saw its shares pounded after revealing more cost problems at its huge Telfer in Western Australia.

Gold mining company Newcrest (NCM) was another miner to release a quarterly report today – with its gold production 2% higher on the previous quarter and copper production also 2% higher.

Gold producer Newcrest Mining (NCM) announced today that it has signed a definitive joint venture agreement (JVA) with two Japanese mining groups, Nittetsu Mining Co and Mitsubishi Materials Corporation, to explore for copper-gold in the Namosi region of Fiji.

The market liked the news from Newcrest (NCM) yesterday of record gold production in the fourth quarter and the year to June.

Newcrest Mining has revamped its copper pricing system in an attempt to lift profit margins by giving it greater exposure to current high world metal prices.

Newcrest Mining, the country’s largest gold mining company, has joined the list of resource groups whose operations were hit by weather problems in the first quarter of 2007.

So is miner Newcrest on somebody’s radar or is the market really glad there were no surprises in this result?