Citic Dameng Holdings, China's biggest manganese producer, is seeking to invest in mines in South Africa to help secure enough of the resource to meet the rising needs of the massive steel industry.
Citic Dameng deputy chairman Li Weijian said the company would consider acquiring assets from its second-largest shareholder, Guangxi Dameng, a Guangxi government unit that has a 60 per cent stake in a Singapore-based mining firm with ownership in some manganese and iron ore mines in South Africa.
Li said that one of its goals was to find supplies to meet domestic demand, and China was short of manganese resources.
When Citic Dameng listed last November, Guangxi Dameng granted it a preferential right to buy the stake in the Singapore firm.
Manganese, a hard and brittle grey-white metal, is the fourth-most consumed element in the world after iron, aluminium and copper. Some 90 per cent of the world's consumption of the metal is in the steel manufacturing industry, which needs it to remove impurities and improve steel's strength, hardness and abrasion resistance.
In 2009, China mined 10 million tonnes of manganese ore, which contained 2.4 million tonnes of manganese. It also imported 9.6 million tonnes of ore that year, according to Citic Dameng's listing prospectus.
