Rio Tinto to build tellurium plant at Utah mine; First Solar signals interest

Rio Tinto gets solar exposure

  • Rio Tinto (RIO +0.1%) says it will build a new $2.9M plant at its Kennecott copper mine in Utah to recover tellurium, a mineral used in solar panels.
  • First Solar (FSLR -3.1%) says it is in talks with Rio to procure the mineral for its cadmium telluride semiconductor processing in the U.S.
  • Rio says the plant, which will recover tellurium as a byproduct of copper smelting - extracting a valuable mineral from waste streams - will have a capacity to produce ~20 metric tons/year of tellurium, with production expected to begin in Q4 2021.
  • Along with producing nearly 20% of U.S. copper, Kennecott's smelting process also recovers gold, silver, lead carbonate, platinum, palladium and selenium.
  • The company's production from Kennecott totaled 140K tons last year, down 25% from 2019 due to lower grades in part of the operation and changes in mining sequencing.

    For this year the company from London could earn a total revenue around 52.58 billion GBp. This is according to the average of the analysts' estimates. This is rather significant more than 2020's revenue of 44.61 billion GBp.

    Historical revenues and results Rio Tinto plus estimates 2020

    historische koersen

    The analysts expect for 2021 a net profit of 16.3 billion GBp. For this year the consensus of the result per share is a profit of 1012 GBp. The PE-ratio therefore is 5.75.

    Huge dividend Rio Tinto

    For this year the analysts expect a dividend of 684 GBp per share. The dividend yield is then 11.75 percent. The average dividend yield of the mining companies is a limited 0.58 percent.

    Rio Tinto 's market capitalization is based on the number of outstanding shares around 7273.31 billion GBp. The Rio Tinto stock was the past 12 months quite volatile. Since last March the stock is even 86 percent higher. This year the stock price moved between 2923 and 6485 GBp.

    Historical stock prices Rio Tinto period 2007-2021

    stock prices riotinto

    Click here for dividend Rio Tinto. At 12.21 the stock trades 2.78 percent lower at 5819 GBp.

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