South African gold production drops 23%

South Africa, the world’s biggest producer of precious metals, said gold production fell 23 percent in August from a year earlier because of an electricity shortage and a protest against power price increases. "There was the Aug. 6 strike by Cosatu that affected mines quite heavily,” Alex Conradie, an economist at the Department of Minerals and Energy, said by telephone from Pretoria today. "The power issues also weren’t there a year ago.” The Congress of South African Trade Unions, known as Cosatu, protested against a 27.5 percent tariff increase by state-owned Eskom Holdings Ltd. to help fund a $44 billion expansion. The utility, which supplies 95 percent of South Africa’s power, started rationing supplies to mines this year because of a shortage of capacity. South Africa’s total mining output declined 6.2 percent and non-gold production fell 3.5 percent, Pretoria-based Statistics South Africa said today on its Web site. Mineral sales jumped 58 percent to 27.52 billion rand ($3.04 billion) in July from a year earlier, it said. Mineral sales data lag production data by a month. South Africa produces more than three-quarters of the world’s platinum and also turns out diamonds, coal, chrome and iron ore. South Africa was the world’s biggest gold producer for more than a century until last year when it was overtaken by China. Ageing ore bodies and safety-related mine stoppages cut 2007 output by 7.4 percent from 2006.