Hello, welcome to Company Focus. My name is Aamer Nawid, analyst at Fat Prophets, and today I'm going to be taking a look at the big four gold producers listed here in the UK.

All the talk this week has been of Robert Zoellick's comments, the President of the World Bank. He's basically said that gold may well play a more prominent role in a revamped international monetary system. This has basically sent gold up to above $1,400 per ounce this week. Strengthening gold price, rallying equity markets - surely this translates to share price gains for all the big gold miners here? Not so.

Each of the big four gold miners have all experienced operational issues so far this year and, unfortunately for investors, a strong gold price has been unable to dominate of dictate the direction of these gold price shares so far.

I'm just going to through them individually. We'll start with the largest producer, African Barrick, which is actually performed the weakest. So this order will actually correlate with how they've performed.

So African Barrick, as you can see from the chart here, a pretty woeful performance since it listed earlier on, around March time this year. Why? Well, third quarter production numbers came out recently and showed a 23 per cent drop off in production, but the real hammer blow was earlier. The company has announced that it uncovered a huge oil theft from one of its mines and the upshot was production came off, costs of production increased and the company have had to go through the upheaval of replacing 40 per cent of the staff at this particular mine, which is a great deal of upheaval.

African Barrick started off the year looking at 850,000 ounces for 2010, but it's going to end up more like around about 716,000 ounces. I think the thieves have given investors a second bite at the cherry as far as African Barrick is concerned. It's a one-off event. The company is still London's largest producer. And I think investors' sentiment will warm once there's more evidence of managerial competency. It's easy to forget that the company has its eyes fixed on 1m ounces by 2014, which is a decent number.

Petropavlosk is another gold miner which has under-performed the broader price of gold. Same sort of boat, a similar thing. It started off with the expectation of 760,000 ounces, probably looking towards producing 510,000 to 530,000 ounces for the year. The main things holding POG back was severe weather conditions as well as delays in mining equipment. I'm still quite comfortable with POG - very comfortable, in fact.

I think overall the stock is traditionally volatile and because of the change in mining schedules management are going to announce their 2011 forecast in late January. I think at the moment the share price definitely overlooks a lot of positive exploration work, particularly at the Pioneer site, so basically an opportunity there.

Randgold Resources, as you can see here, has basically kept up with the price of gold, just about. Again, it's struggled to keep up with expectations from the outset of the year. 477,000 ounces was the initial output estimate. Management in August said it's going to come within 5 per cent of that. So the decline has not been so pronounced, but it's a decline nonetheless.

I think, as you can see here, they have managed to keep up with the price of gold. I think the troubles at Loulo, which were the source of the operational problems - power outages - they look like they've been overcome. And I think, looking forward, investors are going to take great heart from the fact that the first gold bar was produced from the Tongan mine earlier this week, so lots to be positive about regarding Randgold.

Centamin Egypt is the only one of the four to actually significantly outperform the price of gold, which you can see here. It's put on 60 per cent this year, which is a decent amount. But even Centamin has under-performed what it stated at the beginning of the year. It wanted to produce 200,000 ounces, it's going to produce around about 160,000 to 170,000 ounces.

I think overall over the year management at Centamin has been very prudent with their estimates, very conservative, very accurate and I think this is what's encouraging investors. They've recently come out and reaffirmed their view that, despite a strong fourth quarter needed, 160,000 to 170,000 ounces is going to be achieved and, looking forward, by 2012 500,000 ounces is what management are targeting, so very, very positive there. I think there's no getting away from the fact that 2010 has been a very, very challenging year for all the four companies mentioned. For Petropavlosk and African Barrick in particular, I think in 12 months' time investors will look back and think this is definitely a missed opportunity; the share price weakness which is currently on show.

Next year more of the same from gold - I think an eleventh successive year of gains. For gold miners they're going to have to be basically spot on with their forecasts and, operationally, they're going to have to show a great deal of stability.

I think, particularly going back to African Barrick and Petropavlosk, it would surprise me if next year is littered with upward production revisions from what transpire to be fairly sober initial estimates.

Thanks for watching. Make sure you tune in again next week.