Top global miner BHP Billiton delayed its planned $20 billion Olympic Dam copper expansion on Wednesday and said no major projects would be approved in the year to June 2013, as it battles escalating capital costs. BHP reported a 35 percent slide in second-half profit and its first fall in annual profit in three years in the face of falling commodity prices as China's economic growth cools, wrapping up a torrid earnings season for the world's biggest miners.
"It's pleasing to see that there's some capital discipline from the company, so they are not ploughing ahead irrespective of current difficult economic conditions," said Tim Schroeders, a portfolio manager at Pengana Capital in Melbourne. Big miners have all been battered by weaker prices for iron ore, copper, coal, nickel and aluminium as economic growth in big-buyer China slows this year to what is expected to be its weakest pace in more than a decade.
Expanding Olympic Dam, the world's fourth-largest known copper deposit and largest uranium source, was one of three mega projects that were due to go to the BHP board for final approval by December 2012 in an $80 billion pipeline of projects that BHP had flagged were likely to be slowed.
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