GANGWON-DO < invest Korea

According to Yonhap News,

Gangwon Province, Yeongwol-gun and POSCO M-TECH signed an agreement today to establish the Rare Metal Cluster in Yeongwol.

Gangwon Governor Choi Mun-sun, POSCO M-TECH CEO Yun Yeong-cheol and Yeongwol Governor Park Seon-gyu participated in the signing ceremony.

They agreed to closely cooperate to establish factories, hire employees and utilize and develop additional mineral resources.

Part of POSCO Group, POSCO M-TECH specializes in supplying global materials. The company plans to initially invest a total of 44.3 billion won by 2014 to build a smelting facility for molybdenum, tantalum, niobium and rare earth on a 41,000 square-meter site in Yeongwol Agricultural Industrial Complex No. 3.

From 2015, it will make additional investment worth more than 130 billion won in the Rare Metal Cluster including an investment of between 80 billion won and 100 billion won for a rare earth manufacturing facility.

Molybdenum is used to manufacture high-quality ferro alloy. Several countries including China, the U.S., Canada, Peru and Chile account for a whopping 90% of the global reserves and production of the resource.

Currently, it is one of the nonferrous metals that need to be domestically manufactured due to instable supply and volatile prices caused by China's expansion of resource tax.

POSCO M-TECH is planning to invest five billion won to build a smelting facility for molybdenum in the first half of this year and start commercial production of 2,400 tons of the nonferrous metal from the second half of this year.                

The province expects that the investment will create 500 jobs and generate production worth more than 300 billion won, which is expected to contribute to the regional economy.

Following the establishment of a magnesium smelting facility in Okgye, Gangreung, POSCO Group's another project will make the province emerge as a major player in the rare metal industry.

The province continues to aggressively attract more nonferrous metal-related companies and conduct research on its mineral resource deposits.

Source Text

Source: Yonhap News (Mar. 2, 2012)

**This is an English translation of a Korean news article.