G Resources reports higher gold, silver output from Martabe mine

HK-listed G Resources said that its Martabe mine in Indonesia?s North Sumatra Province produced higher volume of gold and silver last year compared to the previous year.

The company reported last week that in 2015, the process plant milled 4,220,000 tons of ore and poured 302,449 ounces of gold and 2,534,486 ounces of silver respectively at All-in Sustaining Costs of US$503 per ounce gold sold.

In comparison, Martabe produced 275,515 ounces of gold and 2,238,076 ounces of silver in 2014.

?The processing plant annual throughput of 4.2 million tons is a record year for Martabe,? G Resources said in the statement.

The company said that Martabe has also achieved another excellent performance in the fourth quarter of 2015. The process plant milled 1,081,000 tons of ore at 2.75 g/t head grade, yielding gold production of 75,831 ounces. In the fourth quarter, silver poured was 636,755 ounces.

As a consequence of the good production and continued focus on the Martabe Improvement Program, the AISC for the fourth quarter were $493 per ounce gold sold, the company said. ?Martabe mine has exceeded our annual production target as stated in the previous announcement.?

G Resources owns 95 percent of PT Agincourt Resources, which owns the Martabe mine. G Resources is in the process of finalizing the sale of Agincourt to a consortium comprising among others of companies linked to Indonesian tycoons.

Elsewhere, G Resources said that safety performance in the quarter remained generally good, with one lost time injury recorded in October 2015 bringing total lost time injuries for the year to two. ?This is an excellent achievement in terms of safety performance as the LTI has been reduced from three LTIs recorded in 2014 at Martabe.?

?Towards the end of the fourth quarter, the Joint Venture of PT NKE and Macmahon has started as the new mining contractor at Martabe,? the company said.

Total mine material movements of ore and waste were 2.12 million tons for the quarter, and 11.5 million tons for the year, which was 4 percent above the plan. The waste to ore strip ratio was at 0.85:1 for the fourth quarter as the mining was focused on ore production rather than waste material for the TSF construction. The waste to ore strip ratio was at 1.57:1 for the year, which was 4 percent below the plan.

?The process plant continued to perform well with gold recovery 5.2 percent above plan for the quarter and silver 5.0 percent below the plan due to more refractory materials and one tank offline for maintenance,? the statement said.

For the full year gold and silver recoveries were 81.4 percent and 65.2 percent respectively, which were in line with the plan. Mill throughput at 1,081,000 tons for the fourth quarter was another high milling rate achieved at Martabe.

As advised in the previous quarterly report, the major equipment of a secondary crusher has been selected and the Front End Engineering Design (?FEED?) study has been completed in the fourth quarter while an internal and external technical review on the downstream debottlenecking is ongoing in parallel with detailed design.

Editing by Reiner Simanjuntak