The Chinalco Tibet Mining Co. Ltd., formally launched in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa on Wednesday, has a registered capital of 250 million yuan (36.5 million dollars), said a statement on Chinalco's website.

The new company will explore, mine, smelt and sell minerals, according to the statement, which was posted on Thursday.

The state-owned Chinalco, founded in 2001, had total assets of 377.7 billion yuan by the end of June.

In recent years, it has expanded its business scope from aluminium to include copper and other nonferrous metals.

Earlier this year, it joined US-based Alcoa in buying nine percent in Australia's Rio Tinto for 14 billion dollars in what was the largest overseas investment ever made by a Chinese firm.

Previous Chinese media reports said that more than 100 minerals had been found in Tibet, and that the remote Himalayan region had the largest copper and chromium reserves in China.

But resources in the region, which has an average altitude of more than 4,000 metres (13,200 feet), had remained largely untapped due mainly to the technical and logistical challenges involved in mining there.

However, mining has become more commercially feasible with the opening of a railway linking Tibet to the rest of the country in 2006.

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