Which Mining Company is the Worlds Biggest Gold Producer?
Though the company only turned 25 years old in 2008, BarrickGold Corp. is the world’s largest producer of gold by several measures of size. It certainly produces the most ounces, with its various mines turning out 7.66 million ounces in 2008. It certainly is most profitable as well, with an operating cash flow of $2.21 billion in that year, seeing that figure 27 percent over 2007 in a time when most of the world’s companies were contracting rapidly. Barrick is pretty much a pure gold company. In fact, it turned down the opportunity to invest in a major gold property in Mongolia recently because it felt that too much of the property’s value was attributable to copper rather than gold. The Toronto-based miner, like most major resource companies today, gets its gold from mines in diverse regions around the world. Its first big mines, where it got its start 25 years ago, were in Nevada and it still produce quite a bit of gold from that state. (A little over 3 million ounces of its producti
