Johannesburg - ANGLO American, the global resources company, is on course to achieving its target of US$2 billion (R15 billion) in cost savings.
CEO Cynthia Carroll told the Mining Indaba in Cape Town on Tuesday that decisive cost-efficiency initiatives had also been put in place across all the group's businesses and that the group was in "great shape" for the upturn.
She said they had implemented programmes to capture more value by realising the very substantial synergies, cost savings and efficiencies that a group of their size should generate.
Carroll said: "Key to all this is our asset optimisation initiative.
This is aimed at unlocking value from existing assets through leveraging embedded knowledge and current practice to yield ongoing cost and productivity improvements.
"The second critical initiative is a streamlined supply chain.
Our global scale is now delivering cost savings and synergies across the supply chain by forming strategic global partnerships with key suppliers."
She noted the initiatives were yielding very significant value.
"We announced a commitment to deliver US$2 billion of value from these initiatives by 2011 and we are well on the way to achieving that target," she added.
"Decisive cost-efficiency initiatives have also been put in place across all our businesses."
She said Anglo was looking to achieve world class performance in each area of its business: to outperform competitors, drive down its cost base, with the resulting enhanced income generation providing a strong base to support future growth.
Carroll added they would continue to sell assets that they had determined were not part of their long-term strategic portfolio, realising proceeds of some US$2.4 billion in 2009.
