Philippe Schiller/Lundin Petroleum AB via Bloomberg

Philippe Schiller/Lundin Petroleum AB via Bloomberg

It's a different reality for the Lundin's, an extremely successful, and well financed oil and mining exploration and development group. Chairman Lukas Lundin tells Mineweb's Kip Keen his copper companies intend to keep their exploration budgets intact, and expresses optimism for continued, high commodities prices. You should read the full article over at Mineweb. Here are a few excerpts:

"In general the prices are not that bad. Copper is $3. Nickel and zinc are a bit in the dumps. Met coal is in oversupply right now. Just a bit tough. But I think resources have been way oversold. You see this in the last week or so. The majors are moving a bit forward. You saw BHP, Rio up three or four percent (on Thursday, July 4).

My feeling is we've seen the bottom. I don't think the juniors will come out of it until we see more money going into the bigger cap companies. And that's going to take some time.

Everybody says it's going to last forever. Nothing lasts forever. I think we're at the bottom of it. I'm pretty optimistic we're going to see some more colour in the fall. It's going to be a bit better. But the big ones come back first, and the midcaps too. Then the money, maybe, flows back to the junior market, which is very, very dead. If you don't have a good management team and you're not well financed, you're non-existent. That can turn very quickly, though. When the money comes back to the market it has an amazing ability to revive companies very quickly."

"... with all these cutbacks by the seniors; first they want to invest; and suddenly, now, they don't want to invest. And they're very scared about rate of return. It's going to have a severe effect on the metal price. I can't say when, but in the next 20, 30, 40 months it will, I would think. If you look at a short copper graph, it looks like it has been way oversold and they're going to have to come back in the market again. So I'm pretty optimistic, actually.

It creates opportunities. For Lundin Mining we were able to buy the Eagle Mine from Rio, on which they spent 10 years and $600 million, and we paid about $300 million."

"Trying to drag the money out of the Russians or Chinese, would take me 10 years... Too much hassle. And, you know, there's always money available."

Source: Mineweb

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