Every Friday morning, SAfm AMLive's radio anchor Caesar Molebatsi speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly. Reported here is this Friday's At the Coalface transcript:

Molebatsi: Foreign investors are shrugging off calls for mine nationalisation and voraciously snapping up investment opportunities.

Creamer: This was very clear with the listing of the Royal Bafokeng Platinum, people were falling over themselves and they actually restricted the overseas investment. They said that we want 60% South African investment and only 40% overseas investment in the raising of the R3-billion ahead of the listing.

The foreigners were falling over themselves oversubscribing, they could have opened the gates to 100% and they would have taken that up. All that the subscribers saw - and they didn't see nationalisation - they just saw the three ‘L's' - large, long-life and low-cost. It is a very good asset, but also the influence of the black control and the black mining.

People are concluding that its going to be hard for nationalisation to beat this. This is not the normal BEE, this is a 57% black-owned company with a base of 300 000 people and not only that, it is black managed, of course, that also set the confidence levels higher.

We see even with Gold Fields with the bond issue that it had recently a billion dollar bond and people falling over themselves to invest in this fixed-interest bond and they got the lowest dollar rate. So there is still a strong appetite for investment in South Africa.

Molebatsi: Yet another private-sector company is preparing to generate its own electricity.

Creamer: You see now, this company that is listed in Helsinki and in London Ruukki, they are also very keen to come into South Africa. Even though they are based and originated in Helsinki, their board meeting was held in Joburg this week.

So, all the people came to Joburg, which shows that the centre of gravity of this company is moving from north to south. They have had chrome mining activities in Turkey, but when they compare their orebodies in Turkey to those in South Africa, they come rushing to South Africa.

These are massive big orebodies. They are keen on big ferrochrome activities and in order to facilitate this they say that they will generate their own electricity. This is what people are saying more and more. We saw Sasol coming in with 800 MW, Xstrata with 600 MW, Anglo thinking of 600 MW and BHP Billiton down at Metalloys with 200 MW.

Now we have got Ruukki coming in and they will start with about 160 MW and could go well ahead of that quite soon, because they are starting with their two DC furnaces for their ferrochrome production, but they are looking at about 10 furnaces.

Molebatsi: This obviously is long-term investment, so it is not like quick cash coming in and quick cash flying out, so there is long-term stability.

Creamer: Long-term fixed foreign investment, just what we need.

Molebatsi: Because there is no long-term power path certainty, gold projects are falling by the wayside - even though the gold price is at record levels.

Creamer: We have got this stratospheric gold price, one would think that people would go to the depths of the earth in South Africa, but they are saying to you ‘hang-on'. The gold miners are not to keen on generating their own power.

Harmony Gold is saying that they can't do a bankable feasibility study on their Evander project, it is a ten-year project, but we haven't got a ten-year electricity price path, we don't know what the electricity price will be in ten years, therefore we can't raise funds on this, therefore we are not going ahead with Evander.

That is what one is hearing on the deeper-level gold mining side. Also, from Gold Fields they are saying that they haven't got a long-term price path, they won't be sinking anymore deep-level shafts. Obviously all these companies have got projects on the go that will be yielding soon, but I'm talking about new projects, fresh projects.

The impediment they see is this lack of long-term electricity price path. Of course, they are comparing it with other opportunities, like Gold Fields would rather rush to West Africa were they can get a pick and shovel and do a free dig of the gold and the oxides on the surface, put them in truck at low cost, and Harmony Gold prefers rushing across to Papua New Guinea and benefitting from a lower cost situation.

So, that's what South Africa is competing with, but we see at the deep-level side the electricity intensive side that the long-life gold mines people don't have an appetite to go that deep anymore, except for AngloGold Ashanti.

Molebatsi: Thanks very much. Martin Creamer is publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly, he'll be back with us at the same time next week.