Excerpt: O. Hegarty interview[yesterday]"For the best part of 3...

Excerpt: O. Hegarty interview[yesterday]

"For the best part of 3 months,Michelmore has complained about the H/Fs and their assault onthe zn metal markrt and his sp.On this Hegarty will say nothing. Yet if OZ made sense in June, it makes more sense today. The challenge is to forget the negatives it can't control and spent the next 12 months presenting the value case and delivering on the promise of the $1.1B investment in the PH cu project.
PH is on track to start prodn by X'mas, and at that point life will change for OZ. It will bcome a cu co. and cu,Hegarty says,is in a different place from many other metals.There's only 200000 tonnes of it in metal market stockpiles, andit's a 20M tonne-a-yr business.That means only about 4 day's supply locked up.
We can sell everything we produce,he insists,Zn's the game. There's a couple of week's supply sitting in the warehouses. The issue is price,not whether we can sell the the stuff.Australia's place in the supply chain is crucial to domestic and Asian markets.It's simple as that.
So what impact will the financial crisis have on aust miners? "During these times you first have to survive, to stay above water, above ground and verticle.The strategy is then to put your no9 boots onas many bloody resourses as you can.You have to tick all the technical boxes , but once you've met the disciplines,pick up those assets.
"People say recovery is gonna take 5 years and the world has changed.I'm not so sureit has changed too dramatically.Butwhen we do come out of this-and we will, we aways do- then the supply side will have slowed, demand will spike and the price will go thru the roof.And yet persuading anyone of that now is impossible"