Australia's Kaboko Mining Signs Off-Take Agreement with China's Sinosteel

SYDNEY, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Australia's mining company Kaboko Mining announced on Thursday that it had signed a strategic off- take agreement with China's steel giant Sinosteel Corporation's subsidiary Sinosteel Australia, for exports of manganese ore to China.

Under the off-take agreement, Africa-focused Kaboko has agreed to sell an initial 180,000 tones of manganese to Sinosteel on an exclusive basis from the company's Zambian manganese projects and priced based on BHP Billiton's reference price.

The product will be mainly sourced from the Emmanuel and Peco projects and shipped from either of the ports of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania or Beira in Mozambique, directly to China, Kaboko said in a statement on Thursday.

First exports under the off-take agreement are expected to start later in 2012, Kaboko said.

"The signing of our first off-take agreement with such a well- known and significant end user is a key milestone for the company and will significantly underpin our mining and development plans and our debt-funding arrangements that we are progressing," Kaboko Executive Director Jason Brewer said.

Shares in Kaboko were up 11.54 percent, at 2.9 AU cents (3.01 U. S. cents) at 14:42 p.m. local time on Thursday.