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Wednesday April 25, 10:25 PMFreeport-McMoRan quarterly profit nearly doubles(Recasts, adds analyst comment, background, stock move, byline)NEW YORK, April 25 (Reuters) - Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. said on Wednesday first-quarter profit nearly doubled, boosted by soaring metals prices and the acquisition of rival Phelps Dodge. The company sold twice as much copper and gold as a year earlier, with the average copper price 23.5 percent higher and the price of gold up more than 50 percent. "With copper prices where they are, it has become a gold mine for them," said analyst Charles Bradford of Bradford Research/Soleil. The $25.9 billion acquisition of Phelps Dodge, which made Freeport the world's largest publicly traded copper company, closed on March 19, so Phelps Dodge contributed only 12 days of results to the Freeport quarter. "The (future) numbers are still a bit iffy for them," Bradford said. "It's hard to get a handle on what they will look like." Freeport shares were off 27 cents at $69.09 in morning trade on the New York Stock Exchange. The company's first-quarter net earnings rose to $476.2 million, or $2.02 per share, from $251.7 million, or $1.23 per share, a year earlier. The Phoenix, Arizona-based miner, which operates the vast Grasberg mine in Indonesia, said revenue rose to $2.3 billion from $1.09 billion. Phelps Dodge contributed $515.7 million. Freeport sold 520.3 million pounds of copper, more than double last year's total of 225.2 pounds, in the quarter. Phelps Dodge contributed 103.2 million pounds. Freeport's average copper price was $3 per pound, up 23.5 percent from a year earlier. Freeport sold about 955,900 ounces of gold at $654.63 an ounce, up from about 472,500 ounces at $405.54 an ounce a year earlier. Gold sales included 9,400 ounces from Phelps Dodge mines. In addition to Grasberg, Freeport now also owns Phelps Dodge mines in the U.S. Southwest and South America and the Tenke Fungurume project in Democratic Congo, believed to be one of the richest copper deposits in the world. (Additional reporting by Michael Erman) |
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