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New Pres of Indonesia may be market friendly
“I was just at APEC last week which has always great insight into what’s going on in Asia Pacific region and the new Indonesia President Joko Widodo was there. It was not clear who is going to show up, but he was on. His presentation was right before mine, I was with Humala and some other people, but he did a great job. I mean, his English was not supposed to be great, most leaders at that conference don’t speak English, they speak their own language, but he gave his presentation in English. He used PowerPoint slides and was really emphasizing infrastructure development and the economy saying the right things who was the G-20 this week.
So the early signs are is that he is bringing a new philosophy into the government of Indonesia. He has appointed ministers many of which were not like virtually all of which were not part of the established political system before. ”
Very positive on the outlook for Copper
“We are so optimistic about the long term future of copper prices. You know you just voted on, what you just voted on is going to be another factor that’s going to be very supportive on constraining long term supply. You know supply is constrained by geologic reasons, by environmental reasons, community issues, government issues and just physically where our new projects are located and as we go through time, exist – great and existing projects are dropping, people are having to move underground in Chile and we’re having to move underground in Indonesia and you know you cut China’s growth rate in half from what we’ve had the last ten years and by the way the President of China was very optimistic about his country’s economy last week.
And you see the decline in existing land and it’s pretty impressive about what’s going to be the requirements for copper 10, 15 years out where’s it going to come from. And so for a company like ours where we have these enormous SEC qualified approved in probably reserves over a 100 million pounds, where we have additional resources that are bigger than that from our existing mines that are not yet reserves but have been identified through core drilling and exploration work.
Our question is how do we get those projects identified, underway so we can have production for the future. That’s a two-edge sword and the copper business, one of the reasons, the price outlook is so strong is because you just can’t turn to spigot on. You just can’t turn to spigot on; you have a do a hell of a lot of work to identify what the resources, how you will mine it, how do you get water or power, other facilities there. And so that’s what we are working on now.”
In any commodity business sometimes you have to make drastic changes
“In any of the commodity business there are prices where you have to make radical changes. I mean, 2008 wasn’t that long ago, because was price of copper in June 30, 2008 was $4 and by midway in the fourth quarter was $1.30. And so we shut down a 100 of those big oil trucks in Morenci, just shut them down. We’ve got our mining rate in half we stopped all of our capital expenditures.”
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