BHP to quit exploration in several countries

BHP to quit exploration in several countries

SYDNEY (Reuter): The Broken Hill Pty Co Ltd will quit exploration work in up to a dozen countries including Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines.

The company also planned to close mineral exploration offices in North America to cut costs and accelerate new projects, The Australian Financial Review newspaper said yesterday.

An internal BHP document prepared this week underlines gold and copper as the major focus of the company's exploration, with half of BHP's exploration budget centered on 19 projects, it said.

The rest would be spent on "reconnaissance activities in terrains around the world ranked highly in the commodity exploration strategies", the document said.

Exploration offices in Toronto in Canada, Houston, Charlotte, South Carolina and Bangor, Maine in the U.S. and the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean will all be closed, it said.

The BHP document said local staff would either be retrenched or transferred to other exploration sites. About 25 people are expected to lose their jobs, it said.

The move to offload grassroots exploration is also designed to maximize the chance of developing a major discovery within five years, the report said.

"This is a case of making some very important business decisions," Hugo Drummet, BHP's general manager and senior vice president of exploration, said in the newspaper report.

BHP officials were unavailable for immediate comment on the report.

BHP is currently ranked as the world's second largest producer of copper behind Chile's Corporacion del Cobre de Chile.