Gutsy Rescuer
Freeport looks forward
When the economic cataclysm hit in the late summer of 2008, many finance teams rushed to cushion the fall. At Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, Kath- leen Quirk and her team rushed to prepare for the bounce. Working with opera- tions and senior management, the finance team preserved liquidity by shutting
down production selectively, delaying some capital expenditures and stopping optional cash
outflows like the common stock dividend, but the strategy was always to protect future growth,
not sacrifice it for stronger fortification.
“We were running in high production mode
for a very different global economy than we
were suddenly facing,” notes Quirk, CFO, EVP
Those moves paid off when copper, the
company’s biggest revenue source, rebounded
to an average price of $3 a pound by the end of
2009 after falling to less than $1.50 in Decem-
ber 2008. It now trades at over $4. Prices for
Photo by Paul Markow
the company’s other products, gold and molybdenum, also rebounded. Higher-cost operations that were temporarily shuttered are coming back online, and Freeport-McMoRan has
returned to strong profitability, generating $2.7
billion in net income in the first nine months
of 2010. Cash on the balance sheet, roughly
