The Editorial Team |

Surviving on $3 an Ounce Has Lonmin in Race Against Time

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in Africa) – Every day, Lonmin Plc sends thousands of miners hundreds of meters below ground, where they use drills, diggers and explosives to extract about 40,000 metric tons of rock laden with precious metals. The ore is milled, crushed, concentrated, smelted and refined in a month-long process that eventually yields about 4,100 ounces of platinum-group metals each day. Yet for all its trouble, Lonmin’s revenue in the most recent quarter was barely $3 an ounce…

Truecaller Phone App Maker in Talks With Airtel About Africa

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LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – Swedish phone-app developer True Software Scandinavia AB is in talks with wireless operators including Bharti Airtel Limited to expand its fast-growing Truecaller spam-filtering service in Africa. Truecaller is seeking to roll out a version of the app that works with 2G phones, Chief Commercial Officer Ted Nelson said in an interview in Cape Town on Wednesday. About 70 percent of cell users in Africa use so-called service phones — devices that…

Congo Fails to Account for Infrastructure Loans, Group Says

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KINSHASA (Capital Markets in Africa) – The Democratic Republic of Congo’s government failed to account for more than half a billion dollars of infrastructure loans received from Chinese institutions over a six-year period, according to the Carter Center. Sicomines, a Chinese-Congolese copper-mining venture, received $1.163 billion in loans between 2008 and 2014 to spend on infrastructure, but disbursed only $478 million, the Atlanta-based advocacy group said in a report published Nov. 3. Its findings are…

Mining Lobby in Court Over South African Black-Ownership Rules

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JOHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in Africa) – South Africa’s Chamber of Mines starts the first of its two-pronged legal fight over the country’s black-empowerment rules Thursday. The case will be heard in Pretoria over two days and pits the chamber, which represents producers including Anglo American Plc and AngloGold Ashanti Ltd., against the Department of Mineral Resources. At stake is whether mining companies can claim to have met black-ownership requirements even after beneficiaries have sold their stakes in…

Egypt Qalaa’s $3.7 Billion Oil Refinery to Start Up in September

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CAIRO (Capital Markets in Africa) – Egyptian Refining Co.’s new $3.7 billion processing plant will begin operations in September and save the government some $300 million a year by reducing the country’s reliance on imported fuel, its chairman said. Ahmed Heikal, who is also chairman of investment company Qalaa Holding, a 19 percent shareholder in the project, said construction of the refinery will be completed in June, with operations to begin in September. The Cairo…

Bitcoin’s Exorbitant Energy Costs May Prove to Be Biggest Risk

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LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – It may not matter whether bitcoin’s a bubble. The staggering energy costs associated with “mining” the digital currency could prove to be its downfall. Even as bitcoin flirts with $8,000, the price required for mining to be marginally profitable stands at a jaw-dropping $300,000 to $1.5 million by 2022 based on current growth trends and energy use, according to Christopher Chapman, an analyst at Citigroup Inc., with implied consumption matching…

The Internet of Tomatoes Is Coming, Starting With Boston Salads

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LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – Intrigued by how blockchain was changing finance, an ex-banker at Wells Fargo & Co. and a former executive at Nasdaq Inc. began looking for other opportunities. They looked at applying the technology to insurance, law, even music. Then they hit on farming. Raja Ramachandran and Phil Harris met when they were both working on Wall Street, in 2005 after Citigroup Inc. acquired electronic trading company Lava Trading. The pair remained friends for more than a…

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