Every Friday, SAfm’s radio anchor speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News & Mining Weekly. Reported here is this Friday’s At the Coalface transcript:
Host: A US company this week took steps to buy South Africa’s big aluminium smelter in KwaZulu-Natal.
Creamer: A US firm has agreed to buy Hillside Aluminium Smelter, which is the biggest aluminium smelter in the southern hemisphere. It is interesting that a US company is interested in investing in South Africa, which is a great plus for us. What they are going to do is they are going to buy all the aluminium assets from a company that is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange called South32. So, South32 has got aluminium assets in Australia, aluminium assets in Brazil and aluminium assets in South Africa.
They want to concentrate more on mining certain metals than they want to dispose of this. Alcoa, that is buying this, concentrates only on aluminium. Many feel that this is going to be better for South Africa, because you are going to get a company that is only a pure playing aluminium company owning our biggest aluminium asset, which is likely to mean that there is going to be positive developments there, greater expansion and obviously the jobs are a big thing. There are more than 3 000 people that are employed there and if you look at the downstream activities, we take that aluminium and we also make things from it in South Africa, which gives rise to a lot of other jobs. So, many are enthusiastic and listening to the Americans, they seem dead keen to buy this, because they say that Hillside is very cash positive and they feel they can do a lot with it.
