New Century Resources has signed the first long-term offtake agreements with commodity traders Mercuria Energy Trading and Transamine Trading for zinc concentrate produced from Century mine in Queensland, Australia.
The agreements reflect the strong zinc market fundamentals and current scarcity in global supply of large tonnage zinc concentrate offtake available.
Go deeper with GlobalData
New Century managing director Patrick Walta said: “The execution of these initial offtake agreements represents another exciting milestone for New Century as we progress toward production in Q3 2018.
“New Century is very pleased with the strong demand shown by smelters and commodity traders in its tender process, which is a clear demonstration of the quality of New Century’s concentrate and the current strong fundamentals of the market zinc.
“The company looks forward to building a long-term successful relationship with its new partners at Mercuria and Transamine. We also look forward to finalising the development of other offtakes with shortlisted parties.”
The execution of the offtakes for a portion of the New Century concentrate marks the first agreements to result from the company’s concentrate tender process, which was initiated in the fourth quarter of last year.
A total of 11 interested zinc smelters and commodity traders have submitted indicative offers for the company’s tender process.
In addition to the offtakes already signed, the company has now shortlisted further preferred offtake customers and is moving forward with the development and potential execution of formal offtake agreements with them.
The company had launched a tender for 1.5Mt of zinc concentrate over the first 3.5 years of production and the offtake agreements with Mercuria and Transamine cover around half of this total.
