Marcventures completes second shipment of high-grade nickel

MANILA, Philippines - Marcventures Mining & Development Corp. (MMDC), a subsidiary of publicly-listed Marcventures Holdings Inc., has completed its second shipment of high-grade nickel ore worth $3.82 million.

In its disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange, Marcventures said it shipped out an estimated 54,578 wet metric tons of nickel ore to China at a price of $70 per WMT.

The nickel ore, delivered last Sept. 12, has a preliminary minimum grade estimate of 1.8 percent nickel to China.

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 2010.

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 mining 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 this 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 in Europe.

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