Yanacocha Mine

As of Dec/10, Buenaventura (43.65%) informs that operations were according to planned. The Gold Mill, built up for treatment minerals of 2 to 5 grs/Mt Au, continues normally working driving the company for exploring bulk tonnage of these mineral. It´s projected to explore on potentially cupriferous targets at depth.

Yanacocha achieved a 2.06m Au oz in 2009, 14% more than 2008 and a cash cost reduction of 9%.

FY 2009 has been a good year for Minera Yanacocha. Gold production reached 2.06 MM oz while silver production reported 3.8 MM oz, representing a 13.7% increase in gold and a 7.9% rise in total silver production. These encouraging results were largely due to higher gold grades and a reduction in the waste-to-ore ratio, corollary to the change of mine plan designed to reduce the tonnage mined from Chaquicocha and stepping up the ore tonnage extracted from La Quinua and Yanacocha. The gold mill throughput exceeded all expectations in 2009. It processed 5’660,708 DMT with an average grade of processed ore of 0.93 g/t Au and 2.94 g/t Ag with recoveries of 85.4% for gold and 67.4% for silver. Yanacocha reported sales of US$ 2,013 million, US$ 727 million net profit and US$ 982 million cash from operations. Yanacocha continues to work towards starting up the Conga project, a copper-gold porphyry project. Given that it is located east of its current operations, Conga could share facilities with other similar projects in the region. Oxide ore reserves on the other hand, dropped from 13.01 to 10.53 million ounces of gold as of year end 2009. This reduction occurred primarily at Yanacocha (1.49 million ounces) and at La Quinua (1.29 million ounces).