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Cliffs Natural Resources

Noront pays more for Cliffs claims – by Carl Clutchey (Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal – April 29, 2015)

Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal is the daily newspaper of Northwestern Ontario.

Noront Resources has formally acquired three key chromite deposits in the Ring of Fire, but for a much higher price than what the company had offered earlier this year.

The Toronto-based company said Tuesday it increased its offer to US$27.5 million from $20 million after the previous owner of the properties, Cliffs Natural Resources, “received an unsolicited, competing bid.”
“To ensure maximum value was received for its chromite assets, Cliffs then requested that both parties submit revised final binding offers, at which point Noront increased its offer to $27.5 million,” Noront said in a statement Tuesday.

“We feel $27.5 million is an attractive price for the acquisition of these strategic assets,” said Noront president Alan Coutts. Noront now holds 360 mining claims and roughly 65 per cent (80,000 hectares) of the Ring of Fire mining belt located about 500 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay.

“The project has value,” observed Thunder Bay-based Ontario Prospectors Association executive director Garry Clark. “It just depends on how long you can sit on it.”

Cleveland-based Cliffs, which noted the increased amount for the chromite properties in a separate news release Tuesday, said the planned sale “is another step in divesting interests in non-core assets.”

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‘Ring of Fire’ asset sale descends into chaos – by Peter Koven (National Post – April 24, 2015)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

The sale of prized chromite assets in Northern Ontario’s “Ring of Fire” mineral belt has descended into chaos, according to sources and court filings, with multiple bidders and dissenters and no certainty about the endgame.

The whole mess should be sorted out on Friday, when the Quebec Superior Court will listen to arguments and determine how the contested bidding process should proceed. Until recently, this process did not seem controversial in the least.

On March 23, Noront Resources Ltd. announced a deal to buy the chromite assets from Cliffs Natural Resources Inc. for US$20 million. Cliffs is making a much-publicized retreat from Canada, and sold the assets for a fraction of what it paid to acquire them.

The Noront deal was expected to close in mid-April. But on April 13, Cliffs received a $23 million rival bid for the assets, court filings show, which prompted another round of bidding and a disputed result. Additionally, four First Nations groups are contesting Noront’s takeover and told the Superior Court they are plotting their own bid. (Cliffs’ Canadian unit is currently in creditor protection, meaning everything is being done through the courts.)

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Activist leads America’s biggest iron miner out of Ring of Fire, but not danger – by Stephen Gandel (Fortune Magazine – April 16, 2015)

https://fortune.com/

Hedge fund Casablanca Capital took over mining company Cliffs Natural eight months ago. So far, it’s not going so well.

These days, activist investors paint themselves as Wall Street’s turnaround specialists. Activists’ track record at getting companies to boost their share buyback programs, hand over board seats, or put themselves up for sale has been impressive. But when it comes to actually turning around a troubled company, or steering a company away from trouble, the jury on activism is still out.

Last July, activist hedge fund Casablanca Capital won control of the board of mining company Cliffs Natural Resources CLF -3.63% after a six-month proxy fight. Days later, the hedge fund installed a new CEO and said that it had a new strategy to increase shareholder value. Eight-and-a-half months later, Cliffs’ stock has plunged 69%. So much for increasing shareholder value.

To be sure, Casablanca’s biggest problem has been commodities prices, which are out of the hedge fund’s control. Cliffs is the largest U.S. miner of iron. And iron prices in 2014 fell nearly 50% in 2014. That drop has taken Cliffs’ cashflow with it.

But Cliffs was also over leveraged. And it may have tried to do too much too soon. The hedge fund may have also underestimated how hard it would be to compete against its larger and more diversified competitors, such as Rio Tinta Group and BHP Billiton.

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Cliffs to put mines, rails, ports up for sale in Quebec, N.L. (CBC News Business – April 7, 2015)

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business

Mine company under bankruptcy court protection as it completes its exit from Eastern Canada

The Canadian Press – Idled Quebec iron ore mines, railways and port facilities, are about to be put up for sale as part of a court-supervised exit from eastern Canada by Cliffs Natural Resources.

The Cleveland-based mining company’s subsidiaries, which filed for creditor protection in January, are seeking a Quebec court’s permission to solicit interest next month in the Bloom Lake mine, the Wabush Mine, and related port and rail assets in Quebec and Labrador, according to a motion filed by monitor FTI Consulting Canada.

Bloom Lake General Partner Ltd. and affiliates such as Cliffs Quebec Iron Mining filed for protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act amid falling iron ore prices.

Excluded from the sale process are Cliffs’ chromite assets in Ontario’s Ring of Fire that are in the process of being sold to Noront Resources for $20 million US.

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Ring of Fire still emerging – Editorial (Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal – March 26, 2015)

Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal is the daily newspaper of Northwestern Ontario.

When the bottom fell out of iron-ore giant Cliffs Natural Resources last year and the company’s big plans for Northern Ontario began to unravel, a competitor remarked that development in the Ring of Fire would still happen one day, “not just on Cliffs’ timetable.”

The remark was unfair because, up until the fall of 2013, Cliffs was the real deal: It had spent $500 million in pre-development work on its RoF properties, and was very close to operating the remote region’s first mine.

Few will forget Cliffs’ thoughtful RoF point-man, Bill Boor, especially his candour and willingness to field questions from all comers.

But many got carried away by the idea that Cleveland-based Cliffs, an established company that floated the prospect of 1,000-plus jobs, could pull it off, even as metal prices dropped.

Earlier this week, Noront Resources announced the move that many expected — the potential purchase of Cliffs’ RoF properties. The US$20 million deal, which includes the big Black Thor chromite deposit, is expected to close next month.

In announcing the plan, Noront president Alan Coutts wisely cautioned against any expectations that his company would be able to quickly pick up where Cliffs left off.

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Cliffs Natural Resources-Noront Resources deal puts new Sudbury smelter in limbo (CBC News Sudbury – March 24, 2015)

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury

Smelter plant hinged on yet to be negotiated power rates, tax dollars to access Ring of Fire

A proposal for a new smelter in Sudbury has been pushed further into limbo after Cliffs Natural Resources announced a deal to sell off its Ring of Fire assets.

The Cleveland-based company said Monday it had entered into a definitive agreement with Noront Resources to purchase its chromite deposits and associated claims for $20 million.

Then Sudbury MPP Rick Bartolucci announced in 2012 that Cliffs would be building a smelter in Capreol, north of Sudbury, to process the chromite it mined in the far north — along with hundreds of jobs. The company even started taking job applications.

However, the new plant hinged on yet to be negotiated power rates, as well as tax dollars, to access the remote Ring of Fire. Neither issue has been settled since. With the sale of Cliffs’ chromite assets and associated claims to Noront Resources, the ball is effectively in Noront’s park.

However, CEO Al Coutts said the company is focusing on mining at this point — not smelting.

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Crummy chromite investment – by Kip Keen (Mineweb.com – March 24, 2015)

http://www.mineweb.com/

Cliffs exits the Ring of Fire.

So ends Cliffs Natural Resources’ adventure in Northern Ontario with the miner announcing that it has a buyer for its Canadian chromite projects. It was an expensive one.

A half-decade ago Cliffs paid some C$350 million in cash and shares to buy majority control of a series of then newly discovered chromite deposits. They were heralded as world-class with potential to supply the North American steel markets especially.

In 2009 and 2010 Cliffs struck deals to buy the juniors involved in the discoveries. It bought Freewest Resources for about C$240 million (in shares at the time). Then it bought up Spider Resources in 2010 for C$125 million (cash).

These were the juniors that put the region on the map – the so-called Ring of Fire. The potential was often billed as huge – a nebulous ~$60 billion or so in deposit value.

The region garnered promises from the Ontario government especially for major spending on infrastructure. For it was remote and would require new road access hundreds of kilometres long through bush and First Nations territory.

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Iron ore strategy the road to ‘self-destruction’, warns Cliffs chief – by Paul Garvey (The Australian – March 12, 2015)

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business

AUSTRALIA’S big iron ore ­miners are on a path towards “self-destruction” and could leave the country with a case to answer before the World Trade Organ­isation, the head of North America’s largest iron ore miner has warned.

Lourenco Goncalves, chief executive of US iron ore miner Cliffs Natural Resources, yesterday told the Global Iron Ore and Steel Forecast conference in Perth the surge in iron ore supply from producers such as BHP Billi­ton, Rio Tinto and Fortescue Metals could send the price of Australia’s most important export to permanently lower levels.

Iron ore prices have more than halved in the past year as surging production swamped cooling demand, although the key iron ore index rebounded slightly yesterday to end a six-day losing streak.

Mr Goncalves said the price of seaborne iron ore shipped by Australian miners could halve again from about $US60 a tonne to as low as $US30 as a result of the major miners’ expansion strategy. “You call that strategy? I call it self-destruction,” Mr Goncalves said.

On Tuesday, Rio Tinto iron ore chief Andrew Harding and his BHP counterpart, Jimmy Wilson, defended their companies’ roles in the creation of the supply glut, arguing that each tonne of supply they did not deliver would have been filled with lesser-quality ore from elsewhere.

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Cliffs Shuns Seaborne Iron Ore as Australia Unit for Sale – by Jasmine Ng (Bloomberg News – March 11, 2015)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

(Bloomberg) — Cliffs Natural Resources Inc., the largest U.S. iron ore mining company, is quitting the seaborne trade in the commodity after the world’s biggest suppliers flooded the market with low-cost output and hurt prices.

The Cleveland-based company will focus on the U.S. market, where demand for steel is increasing, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lourenco Goncalves said at an industry conference in Perth, Australia, on Wednesday. The company’s operations in Western Australia are for sale, he said.

Iron ore tumbled 47 percent in 2014 and has extended losses this year as surging low-cost supply from Rio Tinto Group and BHP Billiton Ltd. outpaced demand growth, triggering a global glut. Goncalves, who took over as CEO in August after an activist investor ousted the previous management, has sold mines and rationalized other operations in the face of the slumping prices. Cliffs’ stock lost 71 percent over the past 12 months, and is at the lowest since 2004.

“Here in Australia, we have a very good operation,” said Goncalves. “The asset is for sale, even if someone comes and buys to shut it down, that’s fair game. We’d like to sell to someone that will continue to keep the mine in operation.”

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Cliffs to return to core business – by John Pepin (Mining Journal – February 19, 2015)

http://www.miningjournal.net/

MARQUETTE – The top executive for Cliffs Natural Resources said Wednesday the mining company continues to pursue a “rock solid” revitalization strategy of shutting down and selling off its diverse assets elsewhere, reducing debt, and focusing on iron ore production in the Upper Great Lakes region.

“We are back to basics,” said Lourenco Goncalves, Cliffs’ chairman, president and chief executive officer. “We are back to our business, to our real business, the business that made Cliffs a big company, the business that made Cliffs a powerhouse in the United States and abroad and that is producing iron ore in Michigan and Minnesota and that’s it. That’s our business.”

From coal to chromite, from Australia to Canada and the southeastern United States, under previous board management, Cliffs diversified and expanded.

“Everything else was done through a strategy that was not the best one for the company – that was not the best one for the community that the company serves,” he said. “Lots of money was spent and wasted in bad investments we’re correcting all that.”

Goncalves said Cliffs’ now realizes those “mistakes of the past.”

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Cliffs CEO: Foreign steel imports are threat to Minnesota mining – by John Myers (Duluth News Tribune – February 16, 2015)

http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/

VIRGINIA — The biggest threat to Minnesota’s taconite industry isn’t the global glut of iron ore mined in other nations but rather the vast amount of foreign steel that’s being imported to build Amercian projects.

That was the warning Monday from Lourenco Goncalves, president and CEO of Cliffs Natural Resources, the largest taconite iron ore producer in the U.S.

Goncalves said no foreign iron ore producer can get their product to U.S. steel mills as efficiently as U.S. producers in Minnesota and Michigan. But the U.S. imported 23 percent of its finished steel in 2013, 28 percent in 2014 “and that number hit 33 percent in January,” Goncalves told Iron Range business and political leaders Monday.

“The biggest issue we have in this country is imports,” Goncalves said at the company’s annual mining breakfast to update the region on Cliffs’ problems and prospects at its three Minnesota operations.

Goncalves said America is experiencing a relatively booming economy — including automobile manufacturing and construction — but that too many of the new projects are being built with foreign steel that is made from iron ore from Australia or Brazil, not Minnesota.

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Cliffs terminates Ring of Fire assessment process – by Staff (Northern Ontario Business – February 6, 2015)

Established in 1980, Northern Ontario Business provides Canadians and international investors with relevant, current and insightful editorial content and business news information about Ontario’s vibrant and resource-rich North.

The federal environmental assessment of Cliffs Natural Resources’ chromite project in the Ring of Fire has been terminated.

The Cleveland-based iron ore miner notified the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA) on Jan. 5 that it wanted to halt the comprehensive study process that began in September 2011. The CEAA posted the notice of termination on its website, Feb. 5.

Cliffs is now looking to sell its chromite properties in the James Bay lowlands, including its flagship Black Thor deposit. It’s been part of a slow retreat by Cliffs, once regarded as the star mining player in the Ring of Fire, to eventually pull up stakes in Ontario following a management shakeup last summer.

New Cliffs chairman and chief executive officer Lourenco Goncalves told national media outlets last fall that the Ring of Fire didn’t fit into their long-range strategy. The company, instead, is focusing on its core iron-ore assets in Michigan and Minnesota, and catering to its domestic customers.

Since 2010, Cliffs spent $500 million on outlining the mineral potential at Black Thor, but ran into a series of obstacles in securing agreements with the provincial government and First Nations on extending transportation infrastructure into the remote region.

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Currency conspiracy theory wide of the mark with iron ore – by Clyde Russell (Reuters U.S. – February 5, 2015)

http://www.reuters.com/

LAUNCESTON – Some people love conspiracy theories and the latest is that the Australian central bank is deliberately weakening its currency to save the country’s big iron ore miners.

That’s the opinion of Lourenco Goncalves, chief executive of U.S.-based iron ore and coal miner Cliffs Natural Resources but, like virtually all such theories, it fails the test of logic and credibility.

Goncalves argues that the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has manipulated its currency to help his much bigger rivals, the Anglo-Australian pair of Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton.

In comments made on Tuesday, the same day Australia’s benchmark rate was cut by 25 basis points to a historical low of 2.25 percent, the outspoken CEO said the RBA was “taking no prisoners” with the Australian dollar.

“They want to help BHP, they want to help Rio Tinto, they want to help that lady over there, Gina whatever,” Goncalves said, a reference to Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, whose company is due to start up the 55 million tonne a year Roy Hill mine in Western Australia later this year.

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U.S. mining giant Cliffs eliminates Bloom Lake exposure – by Bertrand Marotte (Globe and Mail – February 3, 2-15)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Montreal – U.S. mining giant Cliffs Natural Resources Inc. has “ring-fenced” its Bloom Lake iron ore mine under bankruptcy protection and no longer has any exposure to closing or clean-up costs, senior executives say.

After talks with potential buyers of the Bloom Lake assets over the past two months, it was decided the best action to take was to put them under protection of the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA), Cliffs chairman and chief executive officer Lourenco Goncalves said Tuesday.

That means Cliffs’ Bloom Lake liabilities now stand at zero, he said on a conference call for analysts. Bloom Lake – in northeastern Quebec – is “the cancer that we have to take out” as Cliffs retrenches to focus on its U.S. iron ore business, Mr. Goncalves said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

The company said in November that it was “pursuing exit options” for its Eastern Canada iron ore operations, estimating its maximum exposure to close the Bloom Lake site at between $650-million (U.S.) and $700-million.

“We were going through chemotherapy and that didn’t do it. Now the [cancerous] limb has been cut off,” Mr. Goncalves said in the interview.

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Cliffs highlights huge downsizing in 2014 – by John Myers (Duluth News Tribune – February 2, 2015)

http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/

Cliffs Natural Resources officially highlighted its massive 2014 sell-off on Monday, releasing the company’s fourth quarter and year-end results that show millions of dollars lost as it shuttered and sold large swathes of its holdings.

Cliffs recorded a net loss of $7.2 billion in 2014, or $47.29 per diluted share, thanks largely to selling U.S. coal mining operations at a loss and then declaring bankruptcy at its Bloom Lake Canadian iron ore operations.

Fourth-quarter 2014 consolidated revenues of $1.3 billion were down 15 percent from 2013. The company said the decline was driven by lower revenues from the Asia Pacific Iron Ore and Eastern Canadian Iron Ore segments hit hard by a 45 percent drop in the price of seaborne iron ore as a worldwide oversupply develops.

There was good news from the company’s U.S. iron ore operations, however, as the company moves toward becoming an all-U.S., all-iron ore business.

U.S. Iron Ore’s pellet sales volume in the fourth quarter of 2014 hit 7.8 million tons, a 26 percent increase when compared with 6.2 million tons sold in the fourth quarter of 2013.

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