yaaayyy for the day, page-30

re: sabotage at newstan - roidz Hi Michael,
Look to be honest as i said before i dont see much upside. I know i have preached about this being a typical cycle and from what Im seeing it is following the usual pattern. Initial undersupply than every body ramps up production and we are in to over supply. To illustrate the point on the front page of the Newcastle Morning herald on Friday the headline read 60 million Tonne expansion! referring to the plans for the producers just in the Hunter region. thats almost a 50% increase on the total export tonnage for the country last year. That increase is not taking into account what is also underway in QLD. You can see why prices are softening. As far as Newstan goes we cant take a trick best week of production we hane had since August 39000 tonnes doesnt even pay the electricity bill. Management are having to come to grips with equipment thats past its use by date last week the maingate drive on the longwall self destructed result 9 days no coal and an expensive repair bill. The longwall alignment that was set up to give longer blocks unfortunately is not compatable with our gear. Answer to that is order new face supports @ around 60mil and a two year wait. There are unfortunately no quick fixes but one thing that everybody on site at Newstan knows is that there is no way with the gear we have that we can produce 4 million tonnes like senior management expect it just keeps breaking down. So the next 12 months are going to be challenging we still have 900 mts to go in a block that was to be finished in Oct 05. now more like June 06. This kind of performance doesnt help shareholders or employees so you can imagine this is not a nice place to be at present. the other thing thats killing CEY and its across most the mines is costs thay are rising at a much greater rate than contract increases and i would fear that this more than anything will hurt the half year result i guess we will find out soon enough.
Cheers,
roidz