JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – South Africa needs to create a Johannesburg-based global mining “champion” and to dispel the “wrong” that results from North American mining companies being able to trade at double the market capitalisation of South African peers that have better reserves and better projects, says AngloGold Ashanti CEO Mark Cutifani.

Cutifani, who addressed the Gordon Institute of Business Science in Johannesburg, says South Africa has companies with the potential to be in the global top five, “and AngloGold Ashanti is one of them”.

South Africa does not have a South Africa-based global champion, “and that’s where we have got to work hard to get to”, he says.

“That’s what we’re in discussions with our stakeholders about,” he adds.

Cutifani, who arrived in South Africa a year ago from Canada where he was CVRD Inco COO, has gold-, nickel- and coal-mining experience on three continents.

“I am very, very excited about where I think we can go in the future,” he says of AngloGold Ashanti, a 60 000-employee gold-focused company with 21 operations in ten countries on four continents, which will “look beyond gold at the right time".

The company already has uranium, copper and deep-mining skills that can help it to create value propositions in metals other than gold.

On South African companies being discounted on global bourses because of “the South African factor”, Cutifani says: “When we compare our share price to our major competitors in North America they trade at a share price double the comparative compared to ourselves, so their market cap is double ours and the North American investors quote the South African factor.

“What I have said to them is that I believe that is an artefact of their imagination, but one of the things I believe is something that we don’t seem to do well is that we don’t promote our country in terms of where it is, what it has achieved and where we are going,” Cutifani challenged.

If South Africa fails to grow a global champion mining company, it will have failed to reach its real potential.

He says that South Africa needs to promote the achievements of its people to the world at large.

“We don’t promote our institutions and we don’t promote ourselves as a country as effectively as we should.

“When you have lived around the globe as I have, and then you live in South Africa, you realise that this country is unique and has tremendous potential,” Cutifani says.