Kinross to shut down Denver office, cut 110 corporate jobs

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Kinross Gold Corp. is closing its Denver office and slashing 110 corporate jobs as it continues to grapple with a prolonged slump in precious-metals prices.

The Toronto-based gold producer announced in September that it was letting go 222 employees at its Tasiast mine in Mauritania through a mixture of layoffs and voluntary severances. The combined savings from the staff cuts at Tasiast and corporate operations are expected to total $30-million (U.S.) a year, Kinross said Tuesday.

"Driving down costs, preserving balance-sheet strength and advancing growth opportunities will continue to be priorities going forward," chief executive Paul Rollinson said in a news release.

The company reported a loss of $52.7-million, or 5 cents a share, on revenue of $809.4-million during the three months ended Sept. 30. Its adjusted net earnings – an in-house measure of profitability that excludes items the company says are not reflective of operating performance – was a loss of 2 cents a share.

The revenue beat analysts' expectations of $723.5-million and the adjusted earnings were slightly better than forecasts for a loss of 3 cents a share.

Kinross said it was completing early-stage engineering work on a potential expansion at Tasiast that would add incremental grinding capacity to the West African mine.

The company paid $7.1-billion for the project in 2010, near the height of the commodity boom. A year later, gold began a four-year swoon, falling from $1,900 an ounce to below $1,090, and Tasiast became a symbol for overpriced top-of-the-cycle acquisitions.

Mr. Rollinson, who became CEO in 2012, is striving to rebuild Kinross's balance sheet. Over the past three months, it has reduced net debt by $11-million, to $949.2-million, and finished the quarter with just over $1-billion in cash and cash equivalents.

The job cuts announced Tuesday affect employees at the company's Toronto head office, as well as in Denver, Santiago, Chile and Las Palmas, Spain.