The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Hudbay CEO David Garofalo has found an upside to the global downturn in the mining sector. He tells the Wall Street Journal that the less-than-favourable conditions have spawned an â??ideal marketâ?ù for companies to purchase new assets. â??The (junior miners) are capital-starved and are aggressively pursuing suitors for takeovers or joint ventures as their treasuries become depleted,â?ù Garofalo recently told the newspaper. â??At the other end, all the senior producers are actively rationalizing their portfolios and selling non-core assets.â?ù Garofalo told the Journal that Hudbay is evaluating â??plenty of opportunitiesâ?ù in terms of potential acquisitions. In an interview last year with the Bloomberg financial news service, Garofalo said Hudbayâ??s expansion strategy will rely on investing in exploration companies rather than hefty mergers and acquisitions. â??Itâ??s what we like to euphemistically call our farm system,â?ù he told Bloomberg in early 2012. â??Weâ??re trying to fund promising drill (exploration) programs, and if they find something meaningful we have a seat at the table.â?ù That strategy has been playing itself out in recent years as Hudbay pumps dollars into junior miners searching for ore in places like Flin Flon, Snow Lake and Sherridon. Other HudBay partners own properties in Ontario, Michigan and northern Saskatchewan. Still, HudBay has not shied away acquisitions some might classify as major. In 2011 the company spent over $300 million to purchase Norsemont Mining, complete with its promising Constancia copper project in Peru. Thanks in large part to Constancia, HudBay expects its overall copper production to more than triple by 2016, with zinc output to soar by some 65 per cent.
