London 08/12/2015 - Anglo American plans to consolidate into three business units from six and sell more of its assets, the company said ahead of its investor day.
The new company will comprise De Beers, industrial metals and bulk commodities, it said in a release on Monday.
"We are setting out an accelerated and more aggressive strategic restructuring of the portfolio to focus it around our ‘Priority 1’ assets, being those assets that are best placed to deliver free cash flow through the cycle and that constitute the core long term value proposition of Anglo American," CEO Mark Cutifani said.
As well as announcing the additional capital, cost saving and productivity measures, the company will suspend dividends for the second half of the year, it said.
Capex for 2015 and 2016 will fall by around an additional $1 billion while Anglo has also reduced its 2017 capex to $2.5 billion, a drop of around 55 percent compared with its 2014 expenditure, it added.
Angle expects the cost-cutting measures to deliver $1.6 billion of benefits by the end of 2015 - it also expects to have delivered a total of $3.7 billion of such efficiency improvements, made up of productivity, operating costs and indirect costs, by the end of 2017.
Shares in Anglo, which is the world's largest producer of platinum and a major producer of copper and nickel as well as diamonds, gold, coal and iron ore, are now at an all-time low of 3.50p
(Editing by Mark Shaw)