God had a sense of humour in putting gold reserves in risky places like the Democratic Republic of Congo or Russia, AngloGold CEO Bobby Godsell told Reuters journalists in London. “We go there because God has got a sense of humour. He puts gold in difficult places — not places like Switzerland or Singapore. Do remember that gold is a precious metal because it’s scarce. This is one of the reasons it’s never been a major monetary instrument,” Godsell said.

United Company RUSAL, the world’s biggest primary aluminium producer, might build a nuclear-fuelled smelter with future state nuclear corporation Rosatom, UC RUSAL’s corporate strategy chief Artem Volynets told Reuters journalists in London. UC RUSAL wants to become an energy as well as a metals company and aims to meet as much of its own energy needs as possible, Volynets said. ”One of the advantages of nuclear power stations is you can put them anywhere,” he said. “If we’re going to do anything with Rosatom it would make sense to put it together with a power station near the coast. But it’s too early to say.”  

Steel is no longer strategic for Europe despite the EU having its origins as the European Coal and Steel Community in the 1950s, UBS banker Laurent Charbonnier told Reuters journalists in London. “Before, you know, you had the argument of defence, armours battles, whatever. That’s gone,” said Charbonnier, who is in charge of the bank’s steel, paper and packaging deals in Europe. Charbonnier said deals such as Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal’s acquisition of Luxembourg-based Arcelor could no longer be prevented on the excuse that the sector was strategic or that such a deal would result in mass job cuts such as were seen in the 1980s. ”The pain is behind us,” he said. “It’s not about shutting down plants or anything like that any more. The job cuts have already happened.” Ian Christmas, the chairman of steel industry association IISI, said the sector employed only 10 percent of the people it did 20 or 30 years ago in Europe and North America and now employed about 2.5-3 million worldwide, at least half of those in China.  

There’s no reason why private equity shouldn’t play a bigger role in mining, which in any case isn’t all high-risk, the CEO of Russia-focused miner Aricom told Reuters journalists in London. “There has been a lot of private mining companies for some while,” Jay Hambro said. “The risks that private equity holders may take, or their risk appetite, would be larger than the public equity market.”

Jay Hambro, who is the son of gold miner Peter Hambro, said that in any case the exploratory work Aricom does at iron ore deposits in the Russian far east is far less risky than what some other miners do. “What we’re doing is large-scale dirt-moving and then passing a magnet over the top of it. It’s not very complicated. If you are mining 5 kilometres down in a narrow-vein gold deposit in South Africa with a workforce which is a third HIV-positive, your risks are very different.”

Mining companies flush with cash from a commodities boom could emerge as the driving force in consolidation of the metals industry — not the metals companies themselves — Ian Christmas, secretary general of the IISI steel industry association, told Reuters journalists in London. “I’m not surprised that CVRD bought Inco last year. They had the cash. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find the mining companies as the successful purchasers of Alcoa,” he said. Alcoa has made a $28 billion hostile bid for Canadian rival Alcan in what could be a defensive move to avoid being bought itself, while Brazilian mining group CVRD bought Canadian nickel miner Inco last year in a deal worth a total of $17.6 billion.

When it comes to business, investors don’t fret much about Russia’s image, which has been damaged by events such as the Yukos affair, Russian investor Teijo Pankko told Reuters journalists in Paris. ”We regret what happened with Yukos. We feel that from a human point of view it is very unfortunate that it happened,” said Pankko, the Chief Financial Officer of Altimo, which is the investment vehicle of Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman. ”At the same time, being very rational and pragmatic, I think it’s a fact of life. We have to accept that. I don’t think that in the long run that this individual case would have any kind of consequence for any other businesses,” he added. ”You may have a lot of feelings about it and emotions but if you look at the statistics there are so many transactions that have been done increasingly, especially last year… I believe it’s impressive indeed. I think it says quite the opposite,” he said. “Money makes things happen.”

Italy’s Seat Pagine Gialle doesn’t publish all the images it gathers from webcams, in the interests of protecting privacy — but it does pass them on to the police, Seat’s CEO told Reuters journalists in Paris. Asked whether images gathered by Seat, a yellow-pages publisher that is active on the Internet, didn’t provide opportunities for criminals, Luca Majocchi said: “I agree with you. Actually, we show on the image much less than what we have to, to protect privacy. Second, we try not to use webcams on the street.” Asked what information Seat provided to the police, Majocchi said: “The works we do for the government, say for the police, they are not sent online. We don’t make this accessible on the net. They use our system.” 

The CEO of digital mapmaker TeleAtlas expects the European Union’s Galileo project, designed to be a rival to the U.S. GPS system, to go ahead, albeit with further delays, he told Reuters journalists in Paris. Alain de Taeye said he was a “big fan” of Galileo, which has been held up by the kind of squabbles between EU countries that typify such European ventures as well as a dispute about who will pay the bills for the 3.4 billion-euro project. “Galileo today is encountering a lot of problems that are typical in getting Europeans to agree,” he said. The EU is asking for public funds of 2.4 billion euros to complete the project, originally meant to be part-funded by public-private partnerships, after the companies meant to build it balked at the costs and risks involved. He said the European initiative to build a GPS rival had been a factor in Bill Clinton’s decision to unscramble GPS, which was built for U.S. military use, in 2000. The decision to unscramble could have come earlier but was delayed by the first Iraq war, de Taeye said. “That delayed the whole of our industry,” he said.

Men’s magazines don’t work and women only buy fashion magazines for the advertising, the finance chief of media giant Lagardere told Reuters journalists in Paris. Dominique d’Hinnin, CFO of the French group that publishes Elle and Paris Match, said the only two sections of the magazine market still growing were women’s fashion magazines and celebrity magazines, also read by women. “What doesn’t work is everything bought by men, so there is a global decline in circulation,” d’Hinnin said. “Maybe they don’t know how to read, maybe they are more tecchies than women — I let you draw your conclusions — or maybe they don’t expect the same thing from a magazine as women.” He said Lagardere had found that women, far from being irritated by magazine advertising, actually refused to buy magazines that didn’t contain plenty of ads. “Women’s magazines are one of the very few media consumers are buying because of advertising. You would not sell Elle or Marie Claire or Vogue or whatever if you had no advertising page in it. First, it would be very thin, and no woman would buy it because the reason why most women would buy such magazines is to see what is new — fashion, cosmetics, luxury goods — and they flip the pages and look at the advertising pictures. We made a test, you know, Elle in the U.S. is 400 pages thick and you have 50 pages of editorial content — 350 pages of advertising. If you remove the advertising pictures you don’t sell the magazine. It’s not like TV in this respect nor even like radio where advertising is something you have to have because you have no choice. With a magazine, it’s the opposite, at least women’s magazines, and that’s why the women’s magazine business is not really threatened today by the Internet, because you don’t get the same grade of pictures, you don’t get the same package.” He said cultural quirks, however, meant there were still exceptions to the rule, “mostly in Japan, where women buy fashion magazines for men. We have one of them, it’s quite strange. It’s a magazine about suits. You have 200 pages of grey suits. We never tried to export the concept.”

Neuf Cegetel, France’s leading alternative to France Telecom for broadband Internet access, doesn’t believe there’s room for as many as four networks in France in the long term and wants to continue to take an active part in consolidation, CEO Jacques Veyrat told Reuters journalists in Paris. “We have to consolidate the market. We know how to do that and we will continue to do that,” said Veyrat, who has just agreed to buy Deutsche Telekom’s French internet business, Club Internet. “I think four networks is too many and I think more consolidation is going to happen. I don’t believe in MVNOs as a solution in the long term.” Veyrat said he was keen to be part of fixed-mobile convergence and that there were three ways for Neuf to do this: by getting a licence — but not the UMTS licence that’s up for sale “because UMTS is too expensive for a legacy technology” — through integration with major shareholder SFR, “or do something else, whatever’s available”. Neuf is investing in delivering fibre to the home but Veyrat said it would be “a 20-year fight, street by street, home by home,” adding that he had the appetite for this. “I’m a civil engineer. I’ve been digging all my life. When I see a street, I want to dig.” Asked whether he was considering acquiring France’s main cable provider to speed up the roll-out, he declined to comment.