Jaideep Thatai, a chartered management accountant and former analyst at Nyrstar, has been promoted to head up the company’s IR program, replacing Anthony Simms on November 1.
Simms, who led the IR team at the mining and metals company for almost two and a half years, is now the firm’s corporate counsel in commercial operations.
In addition to Thatai’s promotion, Nyrstar also restructured its investor relations department, reducing the team size from two – a group manager and senior analyst – to one. Thatai will now work alongside Nyrstar’s CEO and CFO in handling the company’s investor relations.
A relatively new company, Nyrstar was listed on the Brussels Stock Exchange in October 2007 when the smelting and alloying operations of Zinifex (now part of Oz Minerals), an Australian mining company, merged with Umicore, a Belgian materials technology company.
The BEL 20-listed company is now one of the world’s largest zinc producers, with operations in Europe, the Americas, China and Australia.
However, the company reported a €32 mn ($41.4 mn) loss in the first six months of 2012, compared to a €16 mn profit in the same period last year, due to a ‘deteriorating macro-economic environment,’ which Nyrstar expects to continue into the fourth quarter of the year. Its company results explained the price of zinc and other metals produced by Nyrstar ‘remained volatile and fell sharply towards the end of H1 2012’.
