Barrick open to acquiring more gold and copper assets

God knows Barrick is short enough of both....

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Barrick CFO Sees a Lot More Upside to Gold Price

From Reuters
Tuesday, December 12, 2006

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/061212/business/business_barrick_cfo_...

TORONTO -- Barrick Gold Corp.'s chief financial officer said on Tuesday that the fundamentals for the price of gold remain strong.

"I think we've got a lot more upside on the gold price. I certainly can see the highs that we had earlier this year being taken out," said Jamie Sokalsky in an interview.

"I think the supply-demand fundamentals that are there are very supportive to gold. There is certainly no shortage of geopolitical tensions around the world and the U.S. dollar has gotten weaker and the outlook for it is for continued weakness."

In May this year, the price of gold reached a high of $730 an ounce. The price has since dropped and was around $628 an ounce on Tuesday morning.

Gold is often seen as a safe haven by investors and the price usually rises as the U.S. dollar weakens, making dollar-priced gold less expensive in other currencies.

The company, the world's biggest gold producer, is also open to more copper assets. Barrick inherited copper operations from its acquisition of Placer Dome earlier this year and is on track to produce about 370 million pounds of copper.

"We would be amenable to additional copper, as part of additional gold assets," said Sokalsky.

"We are really focused on gold, and a number of deposits that exist in the world are copper-gold porphyries. We would really like to have gold, and if copper came along with that, that would be fine with us."

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