Following initial announcements made last Friday, spokesmen for the two largest Indonesian tin producers provided further information on their immediate plans to Reuters and Bloomberg on Tuesday and Wednesday this week.
PT Timah Corporate Secretary Agung Nugroho told both agencies that the company, which mined 32,319 tonnes of tin-in-concentrate in 2014, will cut monthly production to 1,500 – 2,000 tpm from this month. “We have cut our tin ore output and that limits our ability to produce refined tin,” he told Bloomberg. “If prices stay low, inevitably we have to keep reducing production,” he said, adding that Timah is operating 6 to 7 furnaces out of the 12 it owns. Timah’s average operating costs were more that $16,000/tonne he said. “We have reduced a lot of our on-shore mining activities. It is purely to support the price and also cut costs,” he told Reuters. Off-shore mining contributes about 60 percent of Timah’s total production and is cheaper, he said. Timah currently holds stocks of more than 6,000 tonnes of refined tin.
PT Refined Bangka Tin, the country’s biggest private tin smelter, may cut production by at least 10 percent in April from a “normal level” of about 700 tons per month, Chief Executive Officer Petrus Tjandra tolf Bloomberg. “We stopped processing ore into refined ingot two days ago because there’s no stock left,” Tjandra said. The company will rely on slags to make ingot, probably for the next one or two months to keep the furnace running, he said.
