Companies: ORE   

Anglo-Russian mineral developer Aricom has earned its first annual revenues and cut pre-tax losses 27 per cent to £920,000.

Originally a spin-off from Peter Hambro Mining and chaired by that company’s influential deputy chairman Pavel Maslovskiy, Aricom made a maiden net profit of £57,000 after a tax credit of nearly £1 million on turnover of almost £3 million. The company started mining iron ore and ilmenite at Kuranakh in Russia’s far-eastern Amur province and moved an initial 83,000 tonnes of material, with the iron ore destined for China.

Chief executive Jay Hambro says the company expects Kuranakh to produce around 225,000 tonnes of titanomagnetite this year and sell 36,000 tonnes of ilmenite. Elsewhere, an initial feasibility study put a value of nearly £900 million on Aricom’s K&S iron ore project and the company completed a scooping study of another iron ore project at Garinskoye.

Aricom raised £325 million during the year, which it closed with cash of £250 million. The company moved its shares from AIM to the Full List and is now a constituent of the FTSE 250 and its share price, which soared from 16.5p in 2005 to 86p last April, now stands at 78.5p, up 6.5p this morning, valuing the company at £901 million.

They should outperform several sector peers.

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Aricom	LSE	£90.73m	7.67p	0.25p
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Aricom cuts loss			21/02/2008