Miner Details (June 08, 1992)

Spring is annual meeting time, and no better opportunity exists for shareholders and media types to catch a glimpse of the corporate culture and personalities behind Vancouver’s mining companies, which range from the sublime to the ridiculous.

We at The Northern Miner tend to avoid the latter, rather than run the risk of being buttonholed by a slick promoter spewing superlatives to describe ore his company knows is there but hasn’t quite found yet. A twilight zone of sorts can indeed be found among the fringes of Vancouver’s junior mining sector.

But Vancouver is also home to blue-chip majors and a host of dynamic juniors that put this city on the map as a world-class mining centre — all properly listed, of course, on The Toronto Stock Exchange.

Weak metal prices and a lingering recession have made it tough for most seniors to deliver good news to shareholders this year. Take Cominco Ltd., which is struggling to cut operating costs and resolve problems at its smelter complex at Trail, B.C., as well as improve production at Red Dog which is more metallurgically complex than originally estimated. But shareholders at this year’s meeting didn’t seem too concerned; after all the company is far stronger today than before Teck Corp. took control, and it has the financial and technical resources to resolve its problems. The Bob Hallbauer-Norman Keevil team was the best thing to happen to Cominco, and shareholders know it. Even so, they pushed for a committee of independent directors to look into the legal ramifications of the QSL lead smelter problem.

Teck shareholders got better news. This year Keevil was upbeat and obviously pleased that despite tough times the company was able to turn in a strong financial performance and advance several important new projects. But copper, rather than zinc, now appears to be the main metal of interest in the Teck-Cominco organization, particularly those where cathode copper can be produced on site to bypass smelter hassles.

Placer Dome held its meeting this year in Toronto, where it announced Peter Crossgrove would join senior management to head merger and acquisition activities. For years analysts and shareholders have argued over who should run the large globe-trotting gold producer — a mining person or a business person. As the company is $250 million poorer after buying Mt. Milligan, the board has decided — probably with some encouragement by institutional shareholders — that a combination of both would be a good thing.