MANILA, Philippines ? Publicly listed Atlas Consolidated Mining and Development Corp. plans to ramp up the milling output of its subsidiary, Carmen Copper Corp. (CCC), to more than 42,000 metric tons (MT) of copper ore per day, the company said yesterday.

To do this, CCC is commissioning two ball mills at its processing plant in Cebu, said Atlas? assistant corporate secretary Carmen Rose A. Basallo-Estampador in a disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange. CCC operates the Toledo mine in Cebu City.

The two mills are expected to be on stream one after the other in early November this year and in the early part of 2010.

Last August, CCC increased its mining and milling production capacity to 35,000 MT from 25,000 MT per day. Increasing CCC?s capacity to 42,000 MT per day by early 2010 would put it ahead of schedule since this level was originally slated to be achieved by mid-2010. A further capacity increase to about 50,000 MT per day is set for the second quarter of 2011.

CCC is also fast-tracking the commissioning of its iron ore magnetite recovery circuit ?which will generate a valuable by-product credit? to complement existing copper, gold and silver production.

The company recently made its tenth shipment of copper concentrates from the Toledo copper mine.

The shipment totaling 5,570.988 wet metric tons (wmt) was loaded on the vessel M/V Perseus and consigned to the Yanggu Xiangguang Copper Co. Ltd smelter in Qingdao, China.

The shipped concentrates contain about 28.28 percent copper, 3 grams per dry metric ton (dmt) gold and 28.74 grams per dmt silver.

Under the terms of CCC?s offtake agreement with Swiss company, MRI Trading AG, which has recently been extended by a further 30,000 MT of copper concentrates, the contained copper is to be settled at $6,330 per metric ton or $2.87 per pound.

Since the start of production late last year, CCC has exported about 55,221.466 wmt of copper concentrate to China.