COMMENTARY — Anglo American tops corporate list

South Africa’s Anglo American Corp. is the world’s most important mining group measured by the value of the non-fuel minerals production controlled in 1992 — it controls 7.7% of the total Western world value.

The gap between Anglo and its closest competitor, U.K.-based RTZ, is steadily closing. The top rank of Anglo is mostly due to its dominant position in two high-value products, gold and diamonds. Anglo group companies are also the world’s leading producers of antimony, chromite, palladium, platinum, rhodium and vanadium.

RTZ has been growing strongly during the last 15 years. This growth continued in 1992. The London-based group controls more than 5% of the value of non-fuel mineral production in the Western world. In 1975, Rio Tinto Zinc, as it was then known, controlled less than 3% and was fourth on the list. In 1992, RTZ was the world’s leading mine producer of titanium and zirconium, the second largest producer of iron ore, and the third largest producer of copper and lead.

In third and fifth place, respectively, of the Top 50 companies are two successful mining companies from the developing world, CVRD controlled by the Brazilian government and Codelco under the control of the Chilean government. (BHP of Australia is fourth.) Together, the Chilean and Brazilian governments control around 5.5% of the total value of Western world non-fuel mine production.

All of the companies from the developing countries in the Top 50 list are state-controlled except Caemi of Brazil. Programs to sell out state-controlled mining companies were started in Peru, Nicaragua, Argentina, Bolivia and other countries during 1993, but progress has been slow and the impact on control over production is small, mainly because of the low and declining actual production in most of the countries which are privatizing. It seems as if the wave of privatization washing around the world is waning at least temporarily.

The one country where privatization would have a strong and immediate effect on the ownership situation of the industry globally is Zambia. Anglo seems most likely to go in and recapture its control over the Zambian output of copper. If this is the case, Anglo will be catapulted back among the top three copper mining companies in the world.

— From “Who Owns Who in Mining 1994” by the Raw Materials Group, Sweden. The study is available from Roskill Information Services, 2 Clapham Road, London SW9 0JA, U.K.