Chilean copper giant Codelco produced 342,000 tonnes of copper from its mines in the first quarter of 2019, the company said on Thursday, down 18% from the same period a year earlier.
The world ?s top copper miner posted a pretax profit of $372 million for the January-March period, down 31% year-on-year, with a production cost per pound of copper of $1.347, a decrease of 0.3%, the company said.
Copper production at Chile's top mines dropped sharply in the first quarter of 2019, Chilean copper commission Cochilco said earlier this month, amid a perfect storm of operational issues, heavy rains and falling ore grades at the largest deposits.
Following the release of the results, Codelco Chief Executive Nelson Pizarro predicted the price of copper would continue to fluctuate and said he did not expect it to hit an average of $3 per pound in 2019 as the company had previously estimated.
Pizarro also said he is confident an agreement still can be reached with workers from three unions at the company's Chuquicamata mine after they voted to reject Codelco's final labor contract offer on Wednesday.
The unions or the company still can request government mediation, which potentially could avert a strike at the mine.
Codelco is seeking to transform the 100-year-old open-pit deposit at Chuquicamata into an underground mine. The plan is part of a 10-year, $39 billion overhaul of Codelco's key operations as it seeks to maintain output despite rapidly falling ore grades at its deposits.
(By Fabian Cambero, Cassandra Garrison and Adam Jourdan; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Bill Trott)