Shandong Gold International Mining Corp said Thursday it plans to buy a majority stake in Australian gold producer Focus Minerals, the country's latest effort to shore up long-term gold supply.

Through the deal, Shandong Gold, China's third largest gold producer by output, will own 51 percent of Focus, which has four operational gold mines in Western Australia, with an investment of A$227.5 million ($238.2 million).

"The investment by Shandong Gold will help Focus to unlock the company's growth potential at an accelerated pace," Focus CEO Campbell Baird said in a statement, adding that only 4 percent of the company's landholding has so far been explored.

Zhang Dahui, general manager of Shandong Gold, said that the company aims to help build Focus into a major Australian gold producer.

The deal is subject to approval from Chinese and Australian authorities.

Chinese companies are stepping up to invest in overseas gold mines with the aim to shore up long-term supply, due to limited domestic gold reserve, analysts said.

China has a gold reserve of 1,054.1 tons, ranking the sixth in the world and accounting for only 1.6 percent of the country's foreign reserve, far lower than that of the US and Germany, the World Gold Council said in July.

China National Gold Group, the country's largest gold miner, said in August that it was in preliminary talks to acquire stakes in African Barrick Gold. Also in August, Zijin Mining Group, the country's second largest gold producer, completed the acquisition of Australia's Norton Gold Fields.

"Domestic gold companies' target used to be small gold miners in Indonesia and Malaysia, but they are now aiming at big miners in resource-abundant countries amid the global downturn," said Wang Lixin, a researcher at umetal.com, a nonferrous metals industry website in Beijing.

"China's gold demand from investors will increase due to rising prices of gold," said Han Peng, an analyst at SunSirs China Commodity Data Group.

Gold prices rebounded recently, boosted by a third round of quantitative easing announced by the US Federal Reserve and Japanese central bank's recent move to ease monetary policy, Han said.

China produced 176.99 tons of gold in the first half of 2012, up 7.65 percent year-on-year, while the country's gold demand grew at a faster rate of 7.82 percent to reach 356 tons, data from the China Gold Association showed. The association forecast that the demand will surge to 800 tons for the whole year of 2012.