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Vale’s nickel production fell slightly in 2017
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An employee walks past bags of material belonging to mining company PT Vale Indonesia in Sorowako, South Sulawesi, in this undated picture. (JP/Ruslan Sangaji)
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ublicly listed nickel miner PT Vale Indonesia, a local subsidiary of Brazilian mining giant Vale SA, saw its production fall slightly last year to 76,807 metric tons of nickel in matte from the 77,581 metric tons it booked in 2016.
In the fourth quarter of 2017 alone, Vale was only able to produce 19,313 metric tons of nickel in matte, down 4 percent from the production in the previous quarter, as a result of its planned maintenance activities.
“Production for 2017 was about 1 percent lower compared to the figure in 2016. Despite lower production, our 2017 calcine throughput was actually 3 percent higher than 2016,” Vale president director Nico Kanter said in a statement published on Tuesday evening.
Despite such a downward trend in production, Vale’s revenue jumped by 10.6 percent year-on-year (yoy) to US$448.7 million in the first nine months of 2017 following an upward trend in global nickel prices in the third quarter. Vale exported its whole nickel output to Japan with a price of 78 percent of the London Metal Exchange’s nickel cash value.
However, Vale also saw its cost of revenue increase by 16.27 percent yoy to $459.18 million between January and September 2017. As a result, its operating losses skyrocketed to $22.95 million from only $558,000 in the same period in 2016. This caused its net losses to soar by 179.4 percent to $19.6 million. (bbn)
