Innovation to reduce costs, stay relevant and grow, plus creative thinking to replace jobs that will be lost to technology are central drivers of Anglo American's strategic plan for the next five years, the company's chief executive officer said.
The United Kingdom-listed miner plans to grow and will not "be a Kodak or Blackberry," Mark Cutifani said at the 25th Mining Indaba in Cape Town, South Africa, referring to those companies' loss of their market-dominating positions after they were too slow to modernize and expand their offerings."One of the things that people don't appreciate in our industry that's quite unique is that we mine physical resources, and in mining those resources over time the quality of the resources deteriorates - they become deeper and the physical challenges in extracting those resources becomes much more difficult," he said.Anglo and its peers have to mine 16 times the amount of material to produce 1 lb of copper compared with 100 years ago, which means 16 times the amount of energy, twice the amount of water and significantly more resources, Cutifani said. "We can't allow those trends to continue," he added.Miners need to improve costs year on...