Marcventures completes 1st shipment of nickel ore

MANILA, Philippines - Marcventures Holdings Inc.’s wholly-owned unit Marcventures Mining & Development Corp. (MMDC) has completed its first shipment of high grade nickel ore, valued at around $3 million.

In a disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange, Marcventures said the shipment, totaling 55,600 wet metric tons (WMT) of nickel ore, was sold at $54 per WMT to a Chinese firm, one of the top 500 companies in China.

The nickel ore, which came from MMDC’s mine in Cantillan, Surigao del Sur, had a preliminary minimum grade estimate of 1.8 percent of nickel.

MMDC, which secured an environmental compliance certificate (ECC) from the government early this year, is planning to ship a total of 500,000 WMT of high grade nickel ore this year, half of which had already been committed for shipment from June to December 2011 to the Noble Group of Singapore under an agreement signed last December.

MMDC has a mineral production sharing agreement to mine 4,799 hectares of the Surigao del Sur property for nickel and gold.

MMDC’s P474-million nickel ming project was granted tax holidays, duty free importation, and exemption from local government taxes by the Board of Investments.

The company is aiming to produce 600,000 metric tons of nickel ore in the first year of operations and plans to increase it to 800,000 MT and 1.2 million MT in the second and third years, respectively.

It earlier tapped Japan’s Hanwa Co. Ltd. for the exclusive distribution of its nickel ore to countries such as Japan, South Korea, China, India, United States and European countries.

Nickel is commonly used in producing stainless steel, super alloys, electroplating, batteries, coinage, magnets and other industrial and commercial materials.