Business
Barrick Gold profit beats expectations as copper, gold prices surge
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JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) -Barrick Gold Corp reported a 78% jump in first-quarter profit on Wednesday, beating analyst expectations thanks to rising gold and copper prices, and said it was on track to meet annual forecasts.
Production in the second half is expected to be higher than the first, the gold miner said, thanks in part to the ramp-up of underground mining at the Bulyanhulu mine in Tanzania and higher expected grades at Lumwana in Zambia.
Barrick’s first-quarter gold production fell to 1.10 million from 1.25 million ounces due partly to lower grades at its Pueblo Viejo mine in Dominican Republic.
Adjusted profit surged 78% to $507 million in the quarter ended March 31, from $285 million a year earlier, and Barrick announced a 9 cent per share quarterly dividend.
Stronger prices helped boost Barrick’s revenue from its copper mines in Chile, Saudi Arabia and Zambia by 31% from the fourth quarter. Overall earnings per share were $0.29, ahead of analysts’ estimate of $0.27.
“We expect a positive stock reaction to the earnings beat and strong cash flow,” said Credit Suisse analysts.
POTENTIAL FOR SOUTH AFRICA MERGER
Barrick CEO Mark Bristow, who has championed mergers across the gold industry, said he backed the idea of South Africa-listed miners Goldfields and AngloGold Ashanti combining.
Speculation has been swirling around the two companies and Sibanye-Stillwater, whose CEO Neal Froneman floated the idea of a three-way merger in March.
“I’m a South African, and this country has such a great mining history and it would be great to see a real gold business come out of the many failed discussions that we’ve seen,” said Bristow.
Goldfields declined to comment. In a statement, AngloGold Ashanti said it was focused on delivering on its growth plan to unlock value from its portfolio of gold assets.
Bristow also said he had met with the Democratic Republic of Congo’s new mines minister and other officials and was continuing to work on getting $900 million belonging to its Kibali mine joint venture out of the country.
“We have a solution, it just needs to be sanctioned by the appropriate authorities which haven’t been around for a while,” he said, referring to a recent government overhaul by President Felix Tshisekedi.
(Reporting by Helen Reid in Johannesburg and Arundhati Sarkar in Bengaluru; editing by Shounak Dasgupta and Bernadette Baum)
Business
Unplanned shutdown of Imperial pipeline will affect delivery of fuel to Winnipeg for months – The Globe and Mail
Imperial Oil Ltd. has shut down a key pipeline that supplies the Winnipeg area with gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, as the Calgary-based company scrambles to make repairs and find ways to continue transporting fuel to the city by truck and train.
Routine inspections by Imperial IMO-T earlier this year found what the provincial government calls “integrity concerns” in a section of the Winnipeg Products Pipeline under the Red River near St. Adolphe, a community about 30 kilometres south of Manitoba’s capital. The line was shut down on Sunday as a result – an unplanned move that the company says is “preventative maintenance to ensure the integrity of the line.”
Imperial would not provide details about what the inspections uncovered that required the repairs.
The City of Winnipeg’s chief administrative officer, Michael Jack, initially contended that the problem is far worse than Imperial has said but changed his opinion on Monday.
“Candidly, I don’t believe this PR statement accurately conveys the gravity of the situation; we have reason to believe the supply of gasoline products to the entire city (and beyond) may be compromised for a period of time,” he wrote to city councillors on Sunday, in an e-mail obtained by The Globe and Mail.
At a press conference on Monday, Mr. Jack told reporters he is “feeling good” after conversations with Imperial. “We are paid to worry about these things. We don’t send a lot of e-mails saying everything is fine,” he said.
“A discussion around gas can cause people to get anxious, and we just simply don’t have any reasons to think anybody should.”
Later on Monday, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said while there is no reason for the public to panic or for people to stock up on fuel, the government is looking at obtaining backup supplies in case Imperial falls short.
Mr. Kinew said he has also been in contact with North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum to enquire about equipment, logistical expertise and any fuel supplies that the province can turn to the state to help with. More than 50,000 train cars carrying fuel as well as fuel trucks are on their way to Winnipeg as of this week, he said.
“We have a week or two worth of fuel supply in the city right now. Our hope is that that backup supply will be in place ahead of that two-week period,” the Premier said.
The pipeline carries refined petroleum products to Winnipeg from the Enbridge Mainline pipeline at Gretna, Man., on the Canada-U.S. border.
Imperial said in a statement Sunday night that it is arranging alternate forms of transport to keep fuel moving into Winnipeg and surrounding communities. The company is also identifying other terminal locations where customers can pick up products, including at Enbridge’s Gretna crude oil tank terminal, which remains connected to pipeline supply from Western Canada. The terminal has a capacity of about 335,000 barrels.
Gasoline supply will be managed with additional storage and loading capacity at the Gretna terminal, using rail and trucks to transport the fuel to Imperial’s Winnipeg terminal, and arranging for customers to use other supply points outside of the region where possible.
Diesel supply will be managed by rail, and jet fuel by truck.
Imperial said in an e-mail Monday that it expects the line will be out of service for three months, but the company is working to expedite work where possible.
The provincial government and Imperial say nothing has been spilled into the environment from the pipeline.
However, the pipeline shutdown comes at a time of increased scrutiny of Imperial. It came under fire early last year for failing to tell local Indigenous communities about months of leaking from tailings at its Kearl oil sands facility in Northern Alberta into the environment. There have also been two spills at the site in the past year.
The oil pipeline shutdown also comes just weeks after two City of Winnipeg sewage pipelines burst under the Red River. Hundreds of millions of litres of raw sewage had spilled into the river for days, a situation the city attributed to aging infrastructure.
Mr. Kinew said the province is not yet sure whether the Imperial shutdown relates to Winnipeg’s old infrastructure. He is leaning on the company to do the right thing, but “with a healthy dose of skepticism,” he said.
“Through the initial stages of this response, we have seen that there is probably a need for more regulation and legislation in this space,” he said.
Business
USD/JPY moving around, swings helped by thinning liquidity ahead of Bank of Japan decision – ForexLive
Business
Tech giant Nvidia unveils higher performing ‘superchips’ to power AI – Al Jazeera English
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang tells developers conference that computing is advancing at an ‘insane’ rate.
Nvidia has unveiled its latest family of chips for powering artificial intelligence as it seeks to consolidate its position as the major supplier to the AI frenzy.
“We need bigger GPUs. So, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce you to a very, very big GPU,” CEO Jensen Huang said on Monday at a developers conference in California, referring to the graphics processors that are vital in the creation of generative AI.
The event, dubbed the “AI Woodstock” by Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, has become a can’t-miss date on big tech’s calendar due to Nvidia’s singular role in the AI revolution that has taken the world by storm since the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022.
“I hope you realise this is not a concert, this is a developers’ conference,” Huang joked as he took the stage in a packed arena usually reserved for ice hockey games and concerts.
Nvidia’s powerful GPU chips and software are an integral ingredient in the creation of generative AI, with rivals like AMD or Intel still struggling to match the power and efficiency of the company’s blockbuster H100 product, launched in 2022.
Apple, Microsoft and Amazon have also developed chips with AI in mind but for now are stuck trying to get their hands on Nvidia’s coveted products to deliver on their own AI promises.
That linchpin role in the AI revolution has seen Nvidia’s share price rise by roughly 250 percent over the last 12 months, propelling the company above Amazon when measured by market capitalisation, behind only Microsoft and Apple.
Not letting up, Nvidia told the audience of developers and tech executives it was releasing an even more powerful processor and accompanying software, on a platform called Blackwell – named after David Blackwell, the first Black academic inducted into the National Academy of Science.
Blackwell GPUs were AI “superchips” four times as fast as the previous generation when training AI models, Nvidia said.
“The rate at which computing is advancing is insane,” Huang said.
They would also deliver 25 times the energy efficiency, Nvidia said, a key claim when the creation of AI is criticised for its ravenous needs for energy and natural resources when compared with more conventional computing.
Unlike its rivals Intel, Micron and Texas Instruments, Nvidia, like AMD, does not manufacture its own chips, but uses subcontractors, mainly the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
Given the geopolitical concerns with Taiwan and China, this could be a potential weak spot, and the US has banned Nvidia from sending its most powerful chips to Chinese companies.
Nvidia also announced other AI developments, including a platform for training humanoid robots.
Project Gr00t, which Nvidia said was not named after the Guardians of the Galaxy movie character Groot, was described as the “world’s first human foundation model”.
Gr00t-powered robots will be designed to understand what people say and mimic people’s movements, learning from experience how to interact with the world, according to Nvidia.
The models “will enable a robot to learn from a handful of human demonstrations so it can help with everyday tasks and emulate human movement just by observing us”, Nvidia said.
Nvidia said it was also working with Apple to put AI capabilities into the newly-released Vision Pro spatial computing gear.
The collaboration comes as Apple is under pressure to show it is not being left behind by Amazon, Google, Meta and OpenAI when it comes to artificial intelligence.
Nvidia also unveiled the Earth-2 Cloud Platform for predicting climate change, using simulation by AI supercomputers.
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