Mimosa invests $10m

ZIMBABWE’S second largest Platinum Group of Metals (PGM) Mimosa Mining Company, has invested in a new processing plant worthy US$10 million that is expected to shore up processing capacity and consequently production.

The investment was announced by the company’s managing director, Mr Fungai Makoni, when he addressed journalists in Zvishavane on the sidelines of the firm’s long service and superior performance awards last Friday. The awards are meant to celebrate the miner’s employees on achieving the five, 10, 15 and 20 years of service milestone. It also honours excelling employees from the preceding year.

Mr Makoni said the Zvishavane miner is currently performing above installed capacity as its plant is presently processing 220 000 tonnes of ore per month against installed capacity of 185 000 tonnes per month. Despite having the smallest resource ore board compared to the other two platinum producers — Zimplats and Unki — Mr Makoni said Mimosa believes that there still remains a substantial amount of resource in their claims to back current and future investment.

“We believe we still have far to go,” Mr Makoni told journalists.

“We still have a fair amount of resource, although we have the smallest in terms of the PGM resource in the country between our other two colleagues — Zimplats and Unki — but we still believe that we have got value to extract. We did look at the various options for expansion that we got and I think what was critical was to first address some of the inefficiencies that are within our processes.”