Mineweb reported an interview with Anglo American’s (LSE:AAL) CEO, Cynthia Carroll regarding the platinum industry and the company’s recent decline in value.

Anglo American’s CEO, Cynthia Carroll said:

Well, we’ve had a challenging first quarter really on the back of the market conditions, Christy. To just put it in perspective, our operating profit for the first half was $3.7bn or $2.3bn lower than the first half of 2011, so that’s a 38% difference. Now nearly $2bn of that reduction was the result of weaker commodity prices, so met coal prices were down by 20%, thermal coal was down by about 18%, up to 18%, iron ore was up by 21% and platinum was down by 13%. Despite that and the current volatile and uncertain environment, we were pleased to announce that we’ve increased our interim dividend by 14% to 32c, which we believe strikes the right balance between investing in our business for the long term return on capital to our shareholders.

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