BHP Billiton Limited (BHP) CEO, Marius Kloppers, said the company had no reason to change its long-held view that Chinese growth would continue and would continue to be resource-intensive. At the mining giant’s AGM today, Mr Kloppers said the company would maintain its focus on long-term growth in production capacity to meet such needs.

Earlier, Mr Kloppers said the velocity of the recovery in China over the past six-month had been surprising.

“China has been the major and sometimes only source of demand for commodities in 2009,” he said.

”While this demand represented both restocking and underlying demand, we do believe that restocking in China is now essentially complete.”

Mr Kloppers said while the resilience of the Chinese steel sector had surprised the company outside of China, steel capacity usage fell to 50% per cent in the three major steel markets of the US, Europe and Japan.

“We are now seeing the usage rate climb as the first evidence that restocking in the major economies has commenced,” Mr Kloppers said.

”However, the restocking in the US and Europe is progressing very cautiously.”

Mr Kloppers added that the company continues to believe that it would come out of the recession less strongly than in previous cycles.

Meanwhile, chairman Don Argus said BHP shared the view that mainstream science is right in pointing to high risks from unmitigated climate change.

”Equally, we believe that economic growth and a healthy climate are not mutually exclusive,” Mr Argus said.

“By dramatically increasing the carbon efficiency of what we produce, just as we have increased labour and capital efficiency in the past, we believe we can achieve both. To do this we need to cut emissions while maintaining and growing output.”

Mr Argus went on to say that this required the power sector to move away from carbon intensive energy sources, energy consumers to use power as efficiently as possible and greenhouse gas emissions to be reduced cost effectively.

While a range of human activities cause greenhouse gas emissions energy contributes 74% of total emissions,” Mr Argus said.

”Therefore the climate change problem is principally an energy problem.”

Moving onto the issue of executive remuneration Mr Argus assured shareholders that despite what has been reported Mr Kloppers did not receive a 51% increase in his pay.

”The board took the decision to freeze his base salary for this current financial year, that is 2009/2010, and to freeze all Directors’ fees,” Mr Argus said. 

At 1511 AEDT, BHP shares were up 41c to $41.60.