Tertiary Minerals narrows half-year losses

Falling costs have enabled fluorspar-focused miner Tertiary Minerals to narrow its losses in the half year ended 31 March to £143,524, from £200,108 previously."Our projects continue to deliver excellent results and this is expected to continue through the pre-development stages," said executive chairman Patrick Cheetham.Pre-licence exploration costs dropped from £22,074 to just £7,665, while the group recorded no impairment of deffered exploration costs in the period, compared with £69,134 previously. Loss per share fell from 0.23p to 0.14p.While also mining for tantalum, iron and gold, the group's primary focus in fluorspar (of fluorite) which is a halide mineral made of calcium fluoride.Cheetham highlighted the rise in the price of acid grade fluorspar, which jumped from $357/tonne to $460/tonne."The current shortages of Chinese supply reflect a long-term and seemingly irreversible change as China moves from exporting to downstream processing of domestic fluorspar. This has very positive implications for the value of the Storuman [Sweden] project over and above the attractive values indicated by the Scoping Study," he said.Net assets more than doubled to £3.41m, from £1.26m the year before.---BC Tertiary Minerals