African governments seek extracting more revenue from their mining sectors for the industry to be more competitive. South African Mines Minister Susan Shabangu told Reuters earlier this week that any future changes to tax policy would aim to keep the sector, which remains a vital source of employment, competitive. Across Africa, the trend - spurred by red-hot commodity prices which have recently cooled - has been to raise mining taxes and royalties or get a bigger slice of the action. This has ranged from tax hikes in Ghana to Zimbabwe's drive to get foreign mining houses to surrender 51 percent stakes in their local operations to black investors there. Not all investors will be happy with part of the burden shifted to shareholders in the form of a dividend tax. And while the formula by which gold miners get taxed has changed, this has not been extended to other sectors, such as platinum and coal. "It is a structural change and I would not read too much into a change of sentiment on that," Gold Fields' chief executive Nick Holland told Reuters. "The gold industry has already taken royalty taxes which is about 300 million rand ($36.14 million) a year to us. Now we have a mooted carbon tax coming which is probably another 300 million. We can't really take much more," he said. Holland also noted that the ruling African National Congress, while it has gutted the radical idea of mine nationalization, is mooting higher mine taxes that would effectively translate into 50 percent on profits. Still, while hardly a U-turn, the tax cut does at least indicate that ruling party and government thinking on the subject is not just running one way. "We're not aware of any mining jurisdiction in the world that's lowering mining tax at this time," JPMorgan Cavane noted in March shortly after the changes were announced in the 2012 South African budget. This may partly stem from the fact that platinum and coal are regarded as growth areas while gold needs all of the help it can get. But can it arrest a decline in South Africa's gold industry, which has seen it fall from being the Saudi Arabia of the precious metal to the world's fourth biggest producer? That must surely be the government's aim given the sector's importance on the employment front in a country where the jobless rate is probably over 40 percent. But the money that flows to the gold miners' bottom line will likely flow out of the country. The Big 3 gold miners, Gold Fields, AngloGold Ashanti, and Harmony, are all investing heavily in expansion plans elsewhere. With the world's deepest mines, steeply climbing power costs and wages rising by double digits annually, the sun is setting on the sector here. And when the additional earnings get ploughed into Papua New Guinea, Mali and other frontier mining states, the government may not be impressed. This could spark a U-turn on the tax policy for gold miners.
