The miner additionally introduced internally that it’ll not enter into long-term offers to purchase commodities that it doesn’t already produce, in response to the individuals, who declined to be recognized because the matter isn’t public.
Anglo is slimming its operations after BHP’s takeover try, which might have created a commodities powerhouse. BHP ultimately walked away from the deal, however the transfer pressured Anglo to speed up an overhaul of its enterprise, together with plans to dump its platinum enterprise and to exit coal, diamonds and nickel.
It’s now re-focusing on key commodities and trimming cost-heavy enterprise items. A spokesperson for Anglo American declined to touch upon the current strikes. Castelli and Sainsbury didn’t reply to requests for remark.
Anglo led different mining majors in constructing out a considerable commodity buying and selling guide over the previous few years, searching for to seize a few of the huge earnings that corporations like Glencore Plc get from shopping for, storing and promoting every little thing from oil to gasoline and metals.
That meant hiring specialist merchants often called “originators” tasked with putting offers to safe long-term offtake of supplies. In Anglo’s case, the corporate made a multi-year prepayment for cathodes from Capstone Copper Corp.’s Mantoverde venture, a former Anglo American asset. It additionally invested $19 million in Canada Nickel Firm Inc., which got here with an offtake for nickel, iron and chromium.
Now that the Anglo American is exiting nickel and chopping prices, it’s scaling again the buying and selling origination unit — housed inside its advertising division — and not stepping into such long-term offers.
Anglo traded 444,000 tons of third-party copper gross sales in 2023, equal to simply over half of what it mines itself. It additionally expanded into battery metals, liquefied pure gasoline and quantitative buying and selling.
(By Archie Hunter, Thomas Biesheuvel and Jessica Zhou)
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