Irish-based mineral exploration company Ormonde Mining has reported pre-tax losses of €2.5m for the year to December 2008 compared to losses of €580,00 the previous year.
The company said this was due mainly to a write-down of early exploration work on the Salamon and Trives projects.
Ormonde said that an increase in the total resource led it to double its proposed production rate to 400,000 tonnes a year.
It said its Barruecopardo Tungsten project at Salamanca in Spain is positioning itself to become a major, low-capital, long-life tungsten operation at a time when structural changes and integration within the industry continue in anticipation of future tungsten shortages.
Tungsten has a hardness close to diamonds. It is mainly used in the manufacture of cutting steels and in tungsten alloys, electronics, and chemical products
Chairman Mike Donoghue said that the company - in line with many firms - has been curtailing discretionary development and administrative expenditures, and adopting a very conservative approach to budgeting.
He said that credit crisis and overall fall in demand has impacted adversely in metal prices and stock market valuations.
'However, it would appear that we may have reached the trough of the downturn and a sustainable recovery of the stock market is predicted in anticipation of a broader, if low, economic recovery in 2010/2011,' he stated.
He said that within the mining industry, there is general acceptance that the metal commodity shortages have not been rectified during the last five years and stronger metal prices are deemed inevitable when the world economy recovers.
Source: RTE
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