A briefing in London will not have earned Vale many media friends, given few questions generated any concrete answers.
LONDON (MINEWEB) – After much exhortation this writer attended the Vale Day annual media briefing in London and really wished he hadn’t bothered. The world’s No. 2 or 3 diversified miner, depending on whose figures one takes, might just as well not set this kind of thing up given the paucity of actual fact delivered.
Firstly the whole event was conducted in Portuguese with simultaneous translation. Now maybe I’m an arrogant Brit thinking that perhaps such an event should be conducted in English given that it was being held in London, but when one knows that most of the Vale executives who participated probably speak better English than the translator, the logic for conducting the whole media briefing in Portuguese perhaps falls away, or smacks of yet another degree of obfuscation.
Indeed a couple of the Vale execs did start to answer questions in English, but were quickly reminded to continue in Portuguese instead. Given that apparently an earlier investor briefing involving many of the same executives had indeed been handled in English, perhaps emphasises the point.
Vale’s CEO, Murillo Ferreira, should have been a politician. He was very adept at ‘answering’ questions, often at considerable length, without actually dealing with the precise query involved – or maybe it was just the simultaneous translation that didn’t convey what he was saying correctly.
In some cases questions were not answered through supposed confidentiality or in that particular executives, but mostly the CEO, didn’t have the precise fact at hand, but in other cases it seemed to be a pure case of question avoidance, aided by the vagaries of the simultaneous translation system – never very satisfactory.
Indeed my colleague from a prestigious financial newspaper, who asked a number of questions without any of them really being answered in any kind of satisfactory manner, told me he probably wouldn’t attend next year’s Vale Day, if it happens. The writer of this article probably won’t get asked again anyway, which solves that particular problem for me!
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