Jennifer Maki, a chartered accountant who joined Vale in Canada almost 12 years ago in January 2003, was named Nov. 14 as Vale’s executive director of base metals as Peter Poppinga replaces José Carlos Martins as executive director for ferrous minerals. Martins left the company as iron ore, which is the Brazilian mining giant’s main commodity, continues to slump in price with no end in sight.
Poppinga, who had replaced Tito Martins as chief executive officer of Vale Canada and executive director of base metals and information technology in November 2011, led 16 operating sites around the world and in Vale’s quest for asset base optimization over the last three years.
Maki, who has an undergraduate degree in commerce from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, has served as executive vice-president and chief financial officer of Vale Canada since September 2007. Before joining Vale as an assistant controller for financial planning in 2003, she had worked as a chartered accountant for PricewaterhouseCoopers for almost 10 years.
In a March 2013 interview with Upfront, the in-house magazine of PricewaterhouseCoopers, her former employer, Maki observed, among other things, that Vale’s “workforce in Brazil, for example, is much more mobile and they’re much more willing to pursue opportunities outside of their home cities and towns than people are in Canada.” Maki, commenting on how Inco’s culture changed after its 2007 merger with Vale, said, ” We’ve probably become more performance driven by key performance indicators and metrics. You see it right through Vale from their compensation packages to how people are rewarded. I think part of that is coming from a country like Brazil, where there’s a very hungry group of people who have grown up in a developing country. I think they’ve instilled that here and made some major changes across our Canadian operations.”
Since last January, Maki has been the chief financial and administrative officer for base metals, as well as participating in the management of base metals businesses outside Canada. She has been a member of the Board of Commissioners of PT Vale Indonesia Tbk (PTVI) since 2007 and recently became its president commissioner.
Poppinga was born in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. He holds a master’s degree in business administration from Fundacao Dom Cabral in Brazil. He received a degree in geology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1980 and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in Erlangen, Germany and a post-graduate degree in geology and mine engineering from Clausthal University of Technology in Clausthal-Zellerfeld Germany in 1984, with specialist diplomas in geo-statistics from the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto in Minas Gerais, Brazil, and strategic mega trends from Asia Focus, Kellogg Singapore.
He speaks four languages including Portuguese, English, German and French. He worked for S.A. Mineracao da Trindade (SAMITRI) from 1984 until it was acquired by Vale in 1999, when he joined Vale as commercial director and general manager of the iron ore business in New York for Vale subsidiary Rio Doce America before moving to Rio Doce International, Belgium where he led Vale’s market and sales activities in Europe from 2000 to 2004. Between 2005 and 2007, he was president of Vale International S.A. in Switzerland, and from 2008 until the end of 2009 he was executive vice-president human resources at Vale (then Vale Inco) in Toronto.
In January 2010, Poppinga moved to Australia when he was named vice-president for base metals operations for the Asia and Pacific region where he was responsible for operations in Indonesia, New Caledonia, China and Japan.
Vale has mining operations on five continents in 38 countries. Its base metals business is headquartered in Toronto. Vale is the second largest mining company in the world by market capitalization.
Vale CEO Murilo Ferreira, who joins Newfoundland and Labrador Tory Premier Paul Davis, Minister of Natural Resources Derrick Dalle and Conservative Senator Norman Doyle in Long Harbour Nov. 19 to mark nickel production at the new processing plant, is a former CEO of Vale Canada. Ferreira served almost two years as the top Vale official in Canada, starting when the Brazilian mining giant finalized its purchase of Inco in January 2007. He had originally joined Vale in 1977. In 1998 he was appointed executive officer of commerce and finance at Vale do Rio Doce Alumínio S.A.-ALUVALE, a holding company of Vale that was merged into Vale in December 2003. Much of his experience is in aluminum and ferroalloys.
He was chief executive officer of Vale Inco, currently known as Vale Canada, in Toronto and executive director of nickel and base metals sales of Vale when he left the company for personal reasons at the end of 2008 and was replaced by Tito Martins. Ferreira rejoined Vale and replaced Roger Agnelli as CEO on May 22, 2011.
The event in Long Harbour Wednesday begins at 8 a.m. Central Standard Time at the processing plant in the product packaging area.
The Long Harbour Processing Plant will employ about 475 people at full production. Long Harbour, a state-of-the-art hydrometallurgy, or “hydromet” for short, processing facility in southeast Newfoundland on Placentia Bay on the western Avalon Peninsula, about 100 kilometres from St. John’s, and Vale’s Voisey’s Bay mine and concentrator in Labrador are an integrated operation. Nickel concentrate from Voisey’s Bay will be shipped to Long Harbour to be processed into finished nickel and associated copper and cobalt products.
Hydrometallurgy is a chemical process combining water, oxygen or other substances in a pressurized or other vessel to dissolve a metal from its ore, concentrate or an intermediate product (such as matte).
The nickel industry worldwide has traditionally smelted concentrates produced from nickel, copper and cobalt sulphide ores to make an intermediate sulphide product called matte.
Hydrometallurgy has been used for refining the matte to produce high purity nickel, copper and cobalt for the market. Thus, traditional production of these metals has occurred in two steps: smelting and refining. The new hydrometallurgical process that Vale developed and will use at Long Harbour process the nickel concentrate directly to metal products without first having to smelt the concentrate.
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