Chinese consortium takes over 50% stake in copper exploration

TIRANA, May 13 – A consortium led by China’s biggest copper producer has bought a 50 percent stake in Turkey’s Nesko Metal Sanayi ve Ticaret’s Albanian mining operations for $65 million, the Turkish company was quoted as saying by Reuters.
Nesko, owned by Turkish metal trading firm Ekin Maden, runs copper mining businesses in Albania through its Beralb subsidiary which have a capacity of 600,000 tonnes of copper ore a year.
Jiangxi Copper will own a 48 percent stake in Nesko. CRM International (Beijing) Co. Ltd and Beijing Metal Challenge Global Trading Co. Ltd will own 1 percent each.
Albania’s copper exports suffered a blow for the second year in a row affected by lower production and prices. Customs data published by Open Data research centre show copper exports dropped by 23 percent to around 3 billion lek (Euro 21 million) in 2013 at a time when the amount of copper exported dropped by 17.7 percent to 4.7 million tonnes.
Data show China is the final destination of Albania’s copper exports.
Albania’s copper reserves are estimated at around 32 million tonnes in fifty existing mines and deposits.
The key copper exports comes from Turkish-owned Beralb company which has been present in Albania for more than a decade in exploration, exploitation and processing of copper ore, investing around 60 million USD. The company has invested on a new processing plant at Fushe Arres with treatment capacity of 600 000 tons/year of copper ore.
Albania has copper deposits in six regions southeastern Kor衬 and the northern Mirdita, Puka, Shkodra, Kuk쳬 and Has regions.
The northern Mirdita and Puka regions have a high copper potential considering the annual production and number of the mining deposits, says the National Agency of Natural Resources.