Earthstone Holdings — African Spotlight: Manganese Dioxide

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MAY 11, 2010

Earthstone Holdings — African Spotlight: Manganese Dioxide

In pursuit of its operational development plans, Earthstone Holdings has substantially stepped up its activities in Africa, and Zambia is being the key focus.

Dr. Surendra Kumar Sarangi M.Sc., Geology, Ph.D., from Geomin Consultants Pvt Ltd is spearheading Earthstone’s efforts in geologic valuation of opportunities in Zambia. To this end a pilot process was established that is operationally testing the sales and delivery procedures for manganese dioxide.  Our pilot site produces manganese dioxide:

It is initially sorted and then transported in the bags to the storage facility at the town of Mansa:

After sorting and testing at the laboratory at the storage facility the ore is being transported by railway to the port of Dar-Es-Salam for the sales to the customers. Although at this time the described operation has a pilot character (nonetheless, with actual sales), we feel that within a few weeks we will be able to start full-scale sales process. Of course this process is a supplement to regular production, and much is being done in this sense. We are in discussions with a number of local producers, and actually a full-sized roll-up process is under development. We are also in agreement with several mining entities that are willingly delivering their ore for our processing and sales. Current plans call for production level of 20,000 tons of manganese dioxide by the end of 2010.
It is only natural that operations in a new country require a solid logistic support. In just a little bit more than two months the Holdings has set up its Lusaka Headquarters in this beautiful part of the city:

Our facilities include a fully equipped office and comfortable guest houses.

The area around our mining operations in Luapula Province (about 800 kms off Lusaka) – the city of Mansa – shall be the hub of local activities. At this time the local headquarters office is under refurbishment – that, besides logistics facility, shall also include comfortable guesthouses and communications hub.

This is only the beginning of our extensive exploration and mining efforts in the country and we will report more in our subsequent posts.

Infrastructure – Key to Mining

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 03, 2009

This obvious trivial fact that infrastructure is a bottleneck to any mining activity. I mentioned earlier Laos – development of mining industry in Laos to a great extent depends on improvement of infrastructure. That requires, of course massive investments.

Here I would like to point to just released Bridging The Global Infrastructure Gap: views from the executive suite – a KPMG report that has interesting data.

In particular, more than 300 C-level executives and board members representing a cross-section of industries across 22 countries – believe that:

• Only 14% of all senior executives believe that current infrastructure is ‘completely adequate’ in supporting their businesses. Interestingly, 38% of respondents in India and 36% in Russia cite infrastructure there as inadequate, while the comparable figure in China is only 5%
• A full 90% of respondents say the quality and availability of infrastructure directly affects where they locate and expand their business operations.
• 77% of business executives believe there will not be enough infrastructure investment to support the long-term growth of their organizations.
• 80% of executives believe governments should partner with the private sector to finance major infrastructure projects.
• Roads and power generation infrastructure are the most cited priorities by executives globally. Social services infrastructure is also cited globally, while water infrastructure was highlighted by respondents in China and India.

Here are some graphs from the report:

That all means that investor community should expect from the local governments good incentives for infrastructure projects. Attention-grabbing remarks were made by Vietnam Business news agency:

Vietnam’s Infrastructure Investment

Commenting on the global survey, Rupert Chamberlain, Head of KPMG's Financial Advisory Services practice in Viet Nam said "it’s clear from the survey that business leaders globally see quality infrastructure investment as a key to their business, and in an increasingly global business environment Viet Nam must respond to this to remain both regionally and globally competitive. The challenges Viet Nam has, whilst not unique, are in obtaining and allocating scarce capital, both at home and abroad, to improve the landscape for businesses, as well as meeting the social development needs of the country."

Lieven Jacquemyn, a Director in the Global Infrastructure and Projects Group at KPMG in Singapore, who has worked with development agencies and governments in the region on infrastructure financing initiatives, added: "investors we have spoken to who are active in the South East Asian Region have identified Viet Nam as a priority market, in part due to its stable political environment, which is necessary for long term project financing. Last year the Vietnamese Ministry for Planning and Investment undertook a number of encouraging steps towards creating a more transparent and positive environment for private sector infrastructure investment. Viet Nam is certainly a market to watch”