The new agreement will commence from whichever date comes first between the first date of shipment or March 31, 2019. The parties have a long-standing relationship at the mine; the new deal replaces an extended 10-year agreement made between the the companies in 2010, which was itself an extension of terms set out in 2003.
The agreement will cover 100 per cent of concentrate produced at Savannah to be shipped for Sino Nickel via the Port of Wyndham in the Kimberley region of WA.
Sino Nickel is a joint venture that is 60 per cent-owned by Chinese state-owned enterprise Jinchuan Group and 40 per cent-owned by Sino Mining, a company of China Minmetals.
Jinchuan mines, smelts and refines nickel and copper sulfide ores via facilities in Jinchang, a city in Gansu province, northwest China that is nicknamed the ‘nickel capital’ in Mandarin.
Terms of the agreement include product specifications that Panoramic provide material with a typical specification of 8 per cent nickel, 4.5 copper, 0.6 per cent cobalt, (as well as 46 per cent iron and less than 1 per cent magnesium oxide), with the nickel, copper and cobalt being of primary interest.
Between 2004 and 2016 Panoramic shipped 1.2 million tonnes of concentrate to Jinchaun’s smelter and refinery in Jinchang, a value of over $US1.4 billion ($1.89 billion).