MYANMAR’S only copper mine has resumed production more than 12 months after operations were suspended, the managing director of operating company Myanmar Ivanhoe Copper Company Limited (MICCL) said last week.

Production at the Monywa copper mine was halted in April 2008 after MICCL’s explosives contract with Australian company Orica expired. Despite the contract being renewed late last year, work remained on hold – for undisclosed reasons – until earlier this month.

“No copper has been produced since the mine was stopped in April 2008,” MICCL’s managing director Glenn Ford said on May 25. “All I can tell you is that the Monywa project, Myanmar’s only copper mine, has restarted operations.”

The first sign that operations had resumed was May 13, when MICCL placed two tender notices – for local and international suppliers – in the state-run New Light of Myanmar.

Mr Ford admitted last week that MICCL had been forced to lay off some casual staff because of the stoppage and that it would “take a few months before the mine can return to normal production levels”.

In an earlier interview with The Myanmar Times, he said a lack of experienced workers would initially affect operations.

“When production does start it will be on a reduced scale until experienced operators and staff can be recruited and trained to bring production back to the previous levels,” Mr Ford said late last year. “A lot of our experienced Myanmar operators and some very senior staff have left [the company].”

Mr Ford said he could not disclose why MICCL had been given the green light to restart production at Monywa.

“The mine produces copper, which is a strategic metal essential for any infrastructure [development], and [Monywa] is one of the lowest-cost production mines in the world,” he said.

Copper prices dropped dramatically when the global financial crisis took hold last October, falling from a high of US$8940 in July 2008 to less than $3000 at the start of 2009, according to the London Metal Exchange. The price has since recovered to about $4500, and Mr Ford said he expects it to remain steady in the short term.

“I believe the indicators are there that prices will remain where they are at present,” he said. “As the world economy improves, [the price] will rise but nowhere near the highs we saw last year.”

Mr Ford said MICCL had cleared about 50 percent of its 12,000-tonne copper cathode stockpile but had done so at the bottom of the market.

The company was unable to begin selling the stockpile – worth more than $100 million in July last year – until November 2008, when its value had dropped to about $40 million.

Monywa’s maximum annual production is almost 40,000 tonnes of copper cathode, making it one of the biggest copper mines in Southeast Asia. A projected expansion at the nearby Letpadaung deposit could increase production to 200,000 tonnes.

The Monywa copper mine is a 50-50 joint venture between state-owned Mining Enterprise (1) and Canadian company Ivanhoe. In 2007, Ivanhoe placed its Monywa stake in an independent trust pending its sale as part of a deal with Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto.