Yanzhou aims to grow by acquisition

Yanzhou Coal Mining, the listed unit of the nation's fourth-largest coal producer Yankuang Group, will continue to acquire more assets abroad to help it reach its target of tripling its sales in 2015 from last year.

Chief financial officer Wu Yuxiang said the Shandong province-based company would prefer to undertake its acquisitions in Australia, a country whose political stability made it a preferred destination, compared with another major coal producer in the region, Indonesia.

'That said, we are also looking at projects in Canada and Mongolia,' Wu said.

Yanzhou planned to raise its sales target for processed and ready-to-use coal to 150 million tonnes in 2015, up from last year's 49.6 million tonnes. About 100 million tonnes would come from the domestic market, while 50 million tonnes would come from abroad.

In Australia, projects acquired in recent years and those under construction had a combined annual output capacity of more than 30 million tonnes.

In Shandong, existing projects had an annual capacity of about 40 million tonnes. In the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, the company was targeting sales of 50 million tonnes in 2015.

Projects to which Yanzhou has already committed have a total capacity of 40 million tonnes. In Shaanxi province, it has invested a 25 per cent stake in an eight million tonne-a-year project and is in talks to take a minority stake in another similar project.

On Sunday the company posted a 91 per cent year-on-year jump in first-half net profit to 5.18 billion yuan (HK$6.3 billion). Stripping out a 1.5 billion yuan gain due to the Australia dollar's appreciation, pre-tax profit grew 60 per cent, thanks to a 16.6 per cent rise in sales and a 14.5 per cent gain in average sales price.

Production cost per tonne of output grew 12 per cent in the first-half.