Caterpillar misses, cuts view, but says mining has bottomed

The news came as the company reported a weaker-than-expected first-quarter profit.

Caterpillar said it earned a profit of $880 million, or $1.31 a share, down from $1.59 billion, or $2.37 a share, in the year-ago quarter.

Analysts had expected the company to report a profit of $1.40 per share. Sales during the period fell 17 percent to $13.20 billion.

Alexander Blanton, a senior analyst at Clear Harbor Asset Management, said Caterpillar's 9-cent EPS miss was "well within the usual plus or minus 10 percent range," typical for the company.

Caterpillar also said on Monday that it would resume a share buyback for the first time in five years.

Larry De Maria, an analyst at William Blair & Co, said Caterpillar's decision to resume the "mothballed" repurchase program was a "positive factor" and probably was contributing to the market's sanguine reaction to the disappointing results and outlook.

Under that plan, which was approved in 2007, Caterpillar could buy back as much as $3.7 billion of its shares before the repurchase authorization expires in December 2015. The company said it would buy $1 billion back in 2013.

CHINA SALES

Oberhelman told analysts during the call that for the first time in three years the company was seeing relative stability around the world.

"We don't want to be overly optimistic but it certainly feels better than the last two springs," he said.

The decline in first-quarter sales was led by a drop in revenue from mining products, which plummeted 23 percent. Sales of construction equipment fell 17 percent and sales of gas and diesel power systems declined 12 percent, the company said.

With mining orders falling, Caterpillar needed a strong rebound from other customers, including residential construction, to offset that weakness.

But that increased demand from builders has not materialized fast enough, in part because some jumped the gun last spring when unseasonably warm weather, combined with signs of the nascent economic recovery in the United States, prompted many construction equipment customers to place orders for new machines.

In the end, the optimism proved to be a little premature, said Eli Lustgarten, an analyst at Longbow Securities.

Clear Harbor Asset Management's Blanton said Oberhelman's optimism about China seemed to be borne out by the company's sales there, which were higher in the first quarter of 2013 than they were in the comparable quarter last year.

Caterpillar shares were up 2.5 percent at $82.42 on Monday afternoon, after dipping 1.2 percent to $79.50 in the morning. The shares have a 52-week high of $108.79 and a low of $78.25.

Shah Commission ends hearing on illegal mining

Justice M B Shah Commission, engaged in enquiry into illegal mining in Odisha and other states, completed its hearing on Sunday. It is likely to submit final report on Odisha in May-June period before the end of its term in July this year.

On the last day of hearing, the Commission heard the submission made by the miners to develop the mineral bearing areas of the state by contributing to build necessary infrastructure such as roads, public water purification system, medical colleges and university.

The proposal included building 47 roads, establishment of a medical college with 100 beds , a university  and adoption of some government-run hospitals in Sundergarh and Keonjhar districts, which possess about 30 per cent of India’s iron ore reserve.

Earlier the miners had proposed to create a trust with a corpus of Rs 100 crore, which will supervise all the developmental work in the areas.

“The proposal would not only help people in gaining access to quality education, but also benefit them in getting better health services,” said Shah after hearing the detailed proposal on Sunday.

The proposal to set up a development trust in mining areas came when counsel for mine owners, Gopal Subramanium, during one of the hearings, said that some miners had plans to create such a fund. The Commission had then asked other miners to join the trust or contribute to it for basic infrastructure development in the area.

Noted social worker Tulasi Munda, a Padmashree awardee, on Sunday met the Commission to express her views regarding development of the mineral rich areas of the state.

The miners had requested the Commission to direct the state government for providing all necessary support in terms of clearances for the developmental activities.

“The Chief Secretary was present during the hearing, He has said that the government will have no objection to the proposal of miners and they can avail all necessary help from the government,” said Deepak Mohanty, director of mines, Odisha government.

The Commission, which has heard the pleas of miners, the state government and local activists about the alleged violation of mining rules in four phases, did not comment about the exact date of submitting reports.

“It is difficult for us to comment about exact date. We might call either the state government or the miners again, if required before filing the final report,” Justice Shah said.

Cyberthugs put YOUR PC to work as Bitcoin-mining SLAVE

The recent volatility in the value of Bitcoins hasn't prevented cybercriminals from cooking up new ways to distribute malware engineered to mine the currency using compromised computers.

Security researchers at ThreatTrack Security have uncovered examples where the infamous Blackhole exploit kit is being used to distribute a variant of the Fareit information-stealing Trojan onto Windows PCs.

Of course, Fareit has other capabilities besides slurping sensitive information from compromised PCs and sending it back to a remote server. It can also use your computer as a node in a DDoS attack. But some variants also download an additional file onto a compromised PC, save it to a temporary directory, and then execute it, using your PC for its compute power (and hiking up those energy bills). This is the part that interests the Bitcoin baddies. The malware-flingers are using Fareit to surreptitiously install a Bitcoin mining utility.

"Fareit is also known to steal passwords," explained Chris Boyd, a senior threat researcher at ThreatTrack. "In a lot of cases it drops Rogues (like Winwebsec), search redirectors (like Medfos), and infostealers (like Zbot and Cridex)."
"It's interesting that in this case, they (the people who configured this variant) decided to drop a [Bitcoin] miner."
The Blackhole exploit kit is the weapon of choice for running drive-by-download attacks from vulnerable websites. Its application in an attack ultimately designed to distribute rogue Bitcoin mining software is a sign that mining the virtual currency is entering the mainstream of the underground economy, joining rogue antivirus and ad-redirection scams as a way to earn a dishonest living.
ThreatTrack researcher Jovi Umawing said her team had initially found the Blackhole exploit throwing out the Fareit Bitcoin mining attack hosted on a dubious Russian adult website. She said the researchers had been following links from a redirector URL they had been monitoring.
"While malware distributing Bitcoin miners isn't new, we believe this distribution is fairly new," Boyd explained. "There have been a couple of recent incidents of malware dropping a rogue miner on systems (a couple weeks ago there was a variant of the Dorkbot worm dropping a miner), highlighting the growing popularity of Bitcoins to criminal groups."
More details on the attack can be found in ThreatTrack's blog post, containing screenshots of the attack and more details on the malware, here.
Bitcoin is an online decentralised virtual currency based on an open-source P2P protocol. Cybercrooks have latched onto the popularity of the currency by running digital wallet stealing attacks as well as earlier offensives that mine bitcoins using compromised computers, previously seen using variants of the infamous ZeuS banking Trojan. Cybercrooks have also set up fake sites that pose as Bitcoin currency exchanges in order to run phishing attacks.

Dictionary Part 3

Acicular:
or concretions crystalline aggregates which are as fine needles into the rutile.

Acid:
substance that in aqueous solution increases the ion concentration hydrogen and form salts by reaction with some metals and bases.

Active:
all property and rights owned monetary value of a company, institution or individual.

Accumulation:
administrative procedure that involves fusing concessions or petitions and adjacent neighbors, one operator / ... by dispossession: use of methods of primitive accumulation to maintain the capitalist system, commodifying areas hitherto closed market. While primitive accumulation involved the implementation of a new system, the theory Marxist, moving to feudalism, accumulation by dispossession maintains current system, affecting the impoverished crisis overaccumulation of capital.

Ademado (oFortificación):
method of supporting the ground with steel structures, wood or concrete, to avoid failures, subsidence or loosening of walls.

Outcrop:
looms where the ground surface to a mineral or mass rock found in the subsurface.

Agitation:
movement of a liquid or pulp or pneumatic action generated mechanical, sometimes with the introduction of compressed air.

Agglomeration:
grouping, mineral particles cohere by compaction, or or no addition of compounds called binders (lime, cement, clay, etc.). Method of concentrating valuable minerals based on their adhesion properties.

Chipboard:
volcanic breccia composed entirely of rock fragments volcanic.

Added:
coarse material on earth (sand, gravel, and crushed limestone) extracted for use in the construction industry.

Grouping:
meeting two or more mining claims in the same class or nature, belonging to the same owner, which are Economic Units Administrative.

Water drainage from the mine:
that groundwater is pumped to the surface of the Mine / ... regia: combination of three parts of hydrochloric acid and nitric acid, attacking gold. Gold is not attacked by nitric and hydrochloric acids individually.

Extension:
wireworks component of a cylindrical rods used in the Diamond drilling tool is mounted with diamonds and placed between the diamond drill and screw barrel bank of samples in order to maintain the borehole diameter.

Alkali:
substance similar to the chemical properties of soda and potash, violent poisons.

Alloy:
composed of two or more metals to obtain a metallic material possess mechanical properties, improved physical or chemical.

Alfámetro:
meter of positively charged particles (alpha particles), issued by some radioactive materials.

Food (benefit):
mass of rock or mineral particles are introduced a particular benefit to subject plant to a particular process, for example, crushing (or crushed), flotation, among others. As synonymous term is used in some parts of the process the head word.

Dictionary Part 2

AD:
method of selling abroad at prices above
nationals, then, does the dumping in their own country. In AD, the
foreign demand is less elastic than the national, either because the
foreign competition is less, or for any other reason.

Anthracite:
Hard coal and black that contains a high percentage of coal
fixed and a low percentage of volatile matter.

Apex:
highest point of a terminal edge of a reef located on the surface or
point closest to the surface.

Tariff:
tax or duty charged to import or export goods.

Clay:
finely granulated materials consisting of aluminum silicates
hydrated.

Arena:
Natural fine aggregate, including grain sizes of 1/16 to 64 mm
(Sand and gravel, as classified by geological sediment grain size).
The manufactured is ground and sieved / ... limestone: mainly grains of material
calcareous / ... coral: coral rubble / Sandstone: sedimentary rock cemented sand
of silica, lime, clay or iron oxide / ... gold: reservoir formed by erosion
gold, transported by water currents, generally deposited on the
beds and river terraces. Containing free gold particles / ... Bituminous or arenas
tar, oil sands, oil sands, sands oilers, are a
combination of clay, sand, water, and bitumen. From the tar sands is extracted
similar to petroleum bitumen which is converted into a synthetic crude oil or
refined directly by specialized refineries for petroleum products.
Their extraction poses severe environmental consequences.

Arid:
granular material is used as raw material in construction,
mainly. Rock that its content is not considered mineral ore. It differs
other materials for their chemical stability and mechanical strength, is characterized
for its size. There are arid those used as raw materials in processes
industry because of its chemical composition.

Start:
mineral extraction. The method depends on the orientation of the reservoir.
If done with horizontal loading and transport systems, if the site is
much of inclined movement of the rock can be effected by gravity.

Attacked:
is used in the upper part of the drill unloaded and consists of dry sand,
detritus or the like. The purpose, prevent detonation when gases
directed upward dragging rock particles around the collar (mouth) of
Drill / plugger: long wooden stick to put explosives in either hole
the auger / Attack: do act on a certain mineral chemical reagents with
elements in order to obtain solution.

Auger:
Manual rotary drilling apparatus using screw mechanism
penetrate, break up and carry the material surface has been drilled.
Frequently used in the exploration of coal.

Gold:
material containing gold.

Assistant:
Annex pit or fireplace to the principal and is often used for personal or
ventilation.

Advance:
length of a work in the mine.

Average:
English term used in international trade to indicate the
average or average is taken as a rule or general pattern.

Dictionary Part 1

Mining

This blog will a Extractive Mining Model Dictionary is a compilation, synthesis and
systematization of various documents, dictionaries, mining laws and studies
scientists concerning the minería.1 include concepts from some countries
Continent and other concepts developed that serve to understand predation
mining. It should be emphasized that within the framework of mining extractive model, there is no
green mining, sustainable or responsible. Its effects are irreversible environmentally
and its contribution to the climate crisis. A summary of this is Mining Dictionary
Manual of the Popular "Mine Kills us", near edited by Others
Worlds, A.C.


Abandonment:
phase of the mining system. Tapering the production, removal of
quipos mining and disposal of surplus assets, the closure and restoration of
mining excavations. Phase prevention and mitigation of environmental impacts.

Abatement:
decline in the water table or confined aquifers
water table in the unconfined by the extraction of groundwater by
pumping. Difference between static and dynamic levels.

Ablation:
geological action of separating materials of a site.

Open:
coastal opening between two mountains or hills, and forming the
a river mouth, cracking the ground by erosion or tremors;
vacuum formed in the rocks by water action.

Abrasive:
substance to spray shine polish, corrode, mopping, cleaning or removing
other solid materials.

Absorption:
penetration of a gas or liquid between the particles of a solid body,
forming a mixture. May be accompanied by a chemical reaction / radiation ...:
decrease of the radiation passing through a gas, a liquid or a solid (solar radiation
without the Earth's atmosphere, is capable of transmitting surface 1.36 kW/m2
Perpendicular / ... of a gas: amount retained by a liquid or solid. If it happens on
the surface is called adsorption).

Shareholder:
individual (physical) or legal (moral) owns shares in a
company. More votes who owns more shares.

Steel:
iron and carbon alloy.