MINING.COM Staff Writer

UBS AG, Switzerland’s largest bank, is slowing down its commodities hiring expansion after a decade-long bull market drove up pay and created a scarcity of talent. UBS originally wanted to double its commodities staff. Salaries and bonuses for the most-profitable metals traders rose 20% to $2 million to $3 million last year, according to Commodity Search Partners. The Standard & Poor’s GSCI index of 24 raw materials rose fourfold since the end of 2001 and the surge drove commodity investments to a record $451bn in April this year, about 50% more than a year earlier. A report by researcher Coalition showed a group of 10 large banks increase their commodities revenues by 55% in the first quarter.

Indonesian gold miner Newmont Nusa Tenggara’s long-delayed initial public offering is not likely to happen this year as the problematic divestment process has prompted the company to re-evaluate the terms of the IPO. NNT’s management had planned to hold the IPO in the second half of this year, selling a 10 percent stake to the public in a bid to raise $500 million as it expected the delayed divestment process would be completed by mid-April.

Chicagoist reports Pyramid State Park probably isn’t on your radar, but at nearly 20,000 acres it’s the Land of Lincoln’s largest. Despite […]

Mongolia may share its Tavan Tolgoi coal mining project between a majority of the six bidders shortlisted by the government and ask them to work together, Prime Minister Sukhbaatar Batbold told Bloomberg in an interview adding that the final decision is “very close.” Coal production in Mongolia doubled last year to become the nation’s top export earner, spurring the government to push through development of one of the world’s biggest unexploited deposits of the mineral. Peabody Energy Corp., a Shenhua Group Corp.-Mitsui & Co. venture, Vale SA, a Russia-Japan-South Korea group, ArcelorMittal, and Xstrata Plc were all shortlisted.

More than 1,000 workers at two BHP Billiton coking coal mines in Australia staged a third day of strikes in a dispute that is disrupting production from the world’s largest exporter of the steelmaking commodity. Analysts believe the industrial action, added to the 15% cut in annual production caused by monsoon rains and a cyclone, will support rampant prices for steel-making coal which hit an all-time high in April of $330 per tonne. Metallurgical coal accounts for A$24.5bn of the Australia’s A$202.17bn in total annual goods exports.

Influential paper The Financial Times argues in an opinion piece the mining sector, which has been under the cosh for several weeks because of concerns about slowing economic growth and the possibility in the west of a double-dip recession, could rally from current levels.

Global steel production is set to rise to 1.5 billion tons in 2012 and due to increasing costs many ferrochrome and chrome ore producers will increase prices. The devaluation of the dollar, higher labour and fuel costs have led to a substantial increase in costs of ferrochrome and chrome ore production centred in South Africa, Kazakhstan, India, Zimbabwe, Turkey, Oman, Pakistan, Iran and Albania. There is no substitute for chrome in the steel-making process and some 90% of the chromite mined worldwide is converted to ferrochrome, used in the production of stainless steel.