Today we can enjoy seing the modules of the North plant arriving in Vavouto because One must not forget that when Raphaël PIDJOT and I arrived on the scene, SMSP held neither mining titles nor financial means. It was a subcontractor – a piecework company – for SLN at the Ouazanghou and Gomen mines. Today, the figures speak for themselves. SMSP has grown, purchased mining titles, leads the world in nickel ore exports and has entered into the exclusive domaine of metallurgy. It has not always been easy but the company has proved that the Caledonian and particularly the Kanak people were not only capable of controlling a core national sector of activity but also knew how to initiate a process of social diversification centred around mining activity, which would allow them to become entrepreneurs heading their own companies. Subsoil resources alone cannot bring about economic rebalancing. The wider social context must be taken into consideration and natural resources must be allied with a defining social purpose capable of building bridges to link local tribes with the business world. This alliance has been achieved in geographical terms. The NMC, which is the joint venture between the SMSP and POSCO, currently operates two mining centres on the West coast and two others on the East coast, employing over 1000 people as salaried staff, casual workers and subcontractors directly involved in the key mining sector (against 120 people when we bought the business back in 1990). The other joint venure KNS employs 200 staffs and présently provides jobs for over 2 400 people in the Vavouto site. It has also been achieved in sectoral terms, through SOFINOR, given that revenues generated by the key mining sector have brought into being a wide range of diversified activities in the North Province. I am thinking in particular of investments and significant numbers of jobs created in tourism and the hotel trade, in the fields of aquaculture and fisheries and also of all the small business that have grown up around the mining and metallurgy projects.

SMSP Group strategy is therefore about giving local communities the opportunity to become partners in the mining industry by supporting the development of businesses firmly established in the North.

Its aim is to create the conditions required to instigate a process of social and economic diversification centred around the mining industry. It is why SMSP has now become an indisputable player of the emergence of an open and self-aware spirit at an economic and social level.