Beijing reserves its resources publish Sam Xu at 12:12 AM While...

Beijing reserves its resources
publish Sam Xu at 12:12 AM
While we keep happily digging up our metals and shipping them out, the Chinese are taking a slightly longer term view. The Ministry of Commerce and the National Development Reform Commission have reclassified China's tungsten, molybdenum, tin, antimony and fluorite as being in the "prohibited category".

What this means is that no foreign company can get involved in mining these metals. Add this to earlier moves to raise export taxes on metals and the message from Beijing is clear: you westerners can exhaust your deposits and in 50 years we'll still have ours.

So, a company like King Island Scheelite can no longer use its expertise in tungsten to enter a joint venture in China, but Hunan Nonferrous Corp is welcomed here with open arms to take a 50-50 joint venture with KIS on King Island. Who are the suckers?

What China's move means for these metals is that prices, let alone demand, are not going to collapse. KIS is expecting to start tungsten production early next year, probably being beaten across the line by Queensland Ores and running neck and neck with Thor Mining. Paradigm Metals and Vital Metals are still exploring, the latter recently reporting a test concentrate of 78.4 per cent tungsten, well ahead of the saleable grade threshold of 65 per cent.

Over in Spain, Heemskirk Consolidated is working its Los Santos tungsten mine seven days a week instead of five and expects to be producing by March.

The China syndrome
There is no question Asian investors are alive to any opening for specialty metals. Republic Gold has just made a $5.73 million placement, much of which went to Malaysian Chinese investors. They are very interested in Republic's Mt Carbine tungsten project in Queensland, just 40km from Vital's Watershed deposit.

There is no question that Mt Carbine has tungsten � it was mined for that metal from the 1970s until 1986 until the Chinese (them again!) flooded the world market with tungsten, putting mines in other countries out of business as the price plummeted.

Republic has antimony also at one of its Queensland gold deposits.

This metal is fetching a strong $US5300/tonne, so Republic is planning to pin its ears back on that project, too.

While on Chinese doings, there has been a development at YTC Resources, which is controlled by the world's largest producer of tin Yunnan Tin. On Friday, the Hong Kong-listed Poly Investments Holdings did a deal with its fellow Chinese operation to take a 19.9 per cent stake in the Australian listed arm. No explanation was given.

YTC has been reporting good grades from its Doradilla project in NSW with significant tin assays, along with zinc, copper and indium. Doradilla was a tin producer until 1990, when metal prices had collapsed. Poly is in the business of metals trading and operating power stations in Henan province