Brazil & Southern Cone - September 2016 (ISSN 1741-4431)

Codelco CEO raises the alarm: Last month Nelson Pizarro, the CEO of Chile’s state-owned copper mining firm, Codelco, warned that there is “no money” left in the company, the world’s largest copper producer. Pizarro made his remarks – which serve as another reminder of the difficulties caused by the sharp fall in international copper prices – on 23 August at a seminar entitled ‘the contribution of mining to Chile’s development’. A Codelco report released at the end of May noted that in the first quarter of 2016, copper prices fell by 20% compared with the same period in 2015, leading the company to post losses of US$97m in the first half of the year, despite a rise in production (to 906,000 tonnes (t), up 1.4% on the same period in 2015). Codelco accounted for 1.89m t of the 5.76m t of fine copper produced in Chile in 2015 (which was slightly up from 5.75m t produced in 2013).

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