COMPANY NEWS IN BRIEF

Northam Platinum posts 74% jump in earnings

South African miner Northam Platinum reported a surge in interim profit, driven by higher metals prices, and unveiled plans to accelerate its capital expenditure in the second half of the year.

High prices for metals extracted by Northam, including platinum, palladium and rhodium, helped boost PGM (platinum group metals) miners' earnings and weather the impact of the coronavirus crisis.

The platinum producer reported a 74% jump in normalised headline earnings per shares for the six months ended Dec. 31 of 641.5 cents, compared with 369.6 cents in the year-ago period.

Northam said the dollar basket price of the main minerals it mines surged in the half-year period by nearly 50% on-year, while a weaker local currency reduced production costs and further boosted earnings.

The company said it has reinstated all of the capital projects it had temporarily suspended due to the pandemic and planned to accelerate capex in the second half of the year with a 2021 forecast of 3 billion rand (US$203.60 million). - Nampa/Reuters

SAA administrators hope to exit

The administrators of South African Airways (SAA) hope to hand control of the business back to management by the end of the month, the state-owned airline said in a letter to affected parties seen by Reuters.

SAA has been under a form of bankruptcy protection since December 2019, and its fortunes worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic. All operations were mothballed in September 2020 when funds ran low.

The letter, dated March 18, said SAA's board of directors and management were working on a plan to resume flights, without giving a date when that might happen.

The administrators said they had received 7.8 billion rand (US$529 million) out of a R10.5-billion bailout allocated in the government's October mid-term budget.

Out of that, around 360 million rand has gone towards paying unpaid salaries, 1.5 billion rand has been spent on severance packages and 400 million rand has been transferred to creditors who lent money after the airline entered administration. - Nampa/Reuters

Nike sales crimped by pandemic

Nike Inc's quarterly sales missed estimates due to shipping issues and a pandemic-related slump at brick-and-mortar stores, and investors were disappointed by the world's biggest athletic shoe maker's full-year revenue forecast.

Nike forecast "low-to-mid-teens" full-year revenue growth, falling just short of the 15.9% increase in sales that analysts were expecting, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

"I think the expectations for Nike into the call were very high with many analysts upping revenue and earnings expectations into the quarter," said Ivan Feinseth, head of investment at Nike shareholder Tigress Financial Partners.

Revenue rose to US$10.36 billion from US$10.1 billion, while analysts on average had expected $11.02 billion. The company said revenue from North America fell 11% on a currency-neutral basis because container shortages and US port congestion held up inventory by more than three weeks.

US container-freight traffic has slowed significantly in recent months due to Covid-19 outbreaks among dockworkers and safety restrictions aimed at stemming the spread of the virus. - Nampa/Reuters

Ford to partly assemble some vehicles

Ford Motor Co said it will assemble its flagship, highly profitable F-150 pickup trucks and Edge SUVs in North America without certain parts and idle two assembly plants due to the global semiconductor chip shortage.

The US automaker said the chip shortage, combined with the shortage of a part caused by the central US winter storm, is prompting it to build the vehicles and then hold them "for a number of weeks" until they can be completed and shipped. The affected vehicles number in the "thousands," a spokeswoman said.

Ford said it is also idling production at plants in Louisville, Kentucky, and Cologne, Germany.

The costs associated with these actions are covered in the Dearborn, Michigan-based company's previous forecast that profits this year could be hit by US$1 billion to US$2.5 billion due to the chip shortage.

The shortage, which has hit automakers globally, stems from a confluence of factors. Carmakers shut plants for two months during the Covid-19 pandemic last year and cancelled chip orders. - Nampa/Reuters

BP to build Britain's largest hydrogen plant

Energy group BP aims to build Britain's largest hydrogen plant by 2030, as part of the country's push to boost use of the fuel and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The Teesside plant in northern England will have capacity of up to 1 gigawatt (GW) of so-called blue hydrogen, about a fifth of Britain's target of 5 GW of hydrogen capacity by the end of the decade.

Blue hydrogen is produced by converting natural gas into hydrogen and storing the CO2 emissions from its production.

BP has begun a feasibility study on the project to explore technologies that could capture up to 98% of carbon emissions from the hydrogen production process.

H2Teesside will be linked with Net Zero Teesside (NZT), a planned industrial zone that will also be linked to a carbon capture and storage project. The hydrogen could also be used for heating residential homes in the region or for transportation, BP added.

Governments and energy companies are placing large bets on clean hydrogen playing a leading role in efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions, but its future uses and costs are highly uncertain. - Nampa/Reuters