Carlos Slim Increasing Gold Production at Grupo Frisco

Carlos Slim, who has been named the richest man in the world, and is among the top five every year since he broke into the upper group of billionaires, is increasing his gold production through his mining company Grupo Frisco, which is a division of holding company Grupo Carso SAB.

Grupo Frisco acquired a mine just this month, and has plans to open up more mines in 2010. Gold production is up nine times what it was in 2009 already.

Some projects in development include the El Porvenir mine, which they acquired from Goldgroup for $25 million, along with Concheno and San Felipe. The latter two should produce about 68,000 tons of gold and silver ore on a daily basis. The Porvenir mine should produce about 50,000 ounces of gold annually, according to prior Goldgroup estimates.

The challenge for Slim and Frisco is they have their production spread out, which results in higher costs to mine the gold and other precious metals.