South Korea’s state-run company Korea Resources Corporation (Kores) has sold its 11pc stake in Canada’s Capstone Mining Company.
Kores announced on Monday that it had sold its entire stake in the Canadian miner in May for KRW197bn ($172mn). Capstone produces copper at its Pinto Valley mine in Arizona and the Cozamin copper-silver mine in Mexico.
This is the second project that Kores has exited this year as it plans to consolidate its domestic assets and exit from overseas projects. In March, the company sold its 30pc stake in the Santo Domingo copper project in Chile to Capstone, making the latter a 100pc owner of this property.
The company is now planning to sell its stake in the Cobre Panama copper mine, which has around 3.18bn mt of copper reserves and is one of the world’s 10 largest copper mines. The company also plans to sell its share in a coal mine in Australia and a nickel-cobalt mine in Madagascar, per media reports, before completing a merger with Mine Reclamation Corp in September, to reduce its debt worth KRW6.65tn.
The Ambatovy mine in Madagascar is South Korea’s largest overseas mine development project with nickel ores estimated at 146mn mt. Around 28pc of the project is owned by a Korean consortium consisting of Kores, Posco, and STX, with Kores holding 22.5pc of this stake.