Equinox Targeting Acquisition to Add to African Copper Mine

Eqbearing used in a jaw crusheruinox Minerals, owner of Africa’s biggest copper mine, said it’s looking to make an acquisition to add to its Lumwana project in Zambia and forecast continued long-term price gains on supply constraints. “We have an active program underway, looking for opportunities,” Craig Williams, chief executive officer of the Perth-based company, said in an interview. “We’ll certainly be sticking with copper.”

The $841 million Lumwana mine, Zambia’s largest foreign investment project, began production in 2008 and Equinox this month increased its forecast 2010 output by 3.7 percent to 140,000 metric tons of concentrate. Copper in New York last week had its fifth weekly gain as the dollar’s slump enhanced the allure of raw materials and inventories of the metal slumped. “I would like to have another advanced asset that could be in production within two years,” Williams said in an interview on Oct 15. “That could be anywhere on the globe, but we would like to reduce our risk profile so we’d be looking at an equal or lower risk area than Zambia.”