RE: Fair value?10 Jan 2024 13:59
RNS today states initial operating period foreseen at 35 Tons/Day (equates to circa 1.5 Tons/hour).
Assuming they initially target to use higher grade feedstock then we can predict extraction on average of 2 grams/Ton of gold equivalent. Hence would optimistically achieve 70 grams of gold recovery per day. That is just over 2 ounces of gold/Day, worth around 4500 USD at the current gold price.
Once you take account of the operating costs etc for the processing/transportation & handling and noting that it’s a 50/50 JV and so GWMO only gets 50% of the plant running time and hence the gold amount then I would foresee a FCF profit during this initial operations period being only a few hundred bucks per day at best (and that assumes no significant start-up teething problems that would need to be fixed).
On this basis, this is not as some people posting here today would have us all believe going to be in the near term a serious revenue generator to deliver any meaningful amount of free cash flow to support other ongoing GWMO costs for exploration, working capital, admin, etc.
Looking further out after this initial period of operation, the RNS mentions 200 Ton/Day as being a future potential capacity scenario (I assume when the phase 2 (leaching) etc is implemented, etc). This scenario is a long term goal & is irrelevant for the short to medium term.
What they should have reported (but didn’t) in today’s RNS is what the current completed processing plant (phase 1 gravity separation only) will achieve once ramped up to its nameplate capacity after completion of the initial operating period. This is the medium term target of what would actually be achievable and hence allow revenue/profit estimates to be assessed by shareholders. In the absence of these details in this latest RNS you have to go to the 6th June 2023 RNS (link below) where some related info is given as follows:
https://www.greatwesternmining.com/greatwesternmining-com/_img/pdf/230606-processing-update.pdf
This earlier RNS speaks of running the plant at upto 5 Tons/hour for 70 hours/week (total for JV). This equates to 50 Tons/Day (average). Using the same 2 g/T grade gold equivalent as used above then it gets you to a gold amount of 100 grams (overall for both parties of the JV) and so that gets them to just over 3 ounces of gold per day (average) which is valued at around 7000 USD. This increased amount is hardly moving the goal posts versus the initial start-up period amount.
Happy to have anyone pull my back of an envelope numbers herein to pieces…..but if true then this processing plant is a crazy white elephant and could very likely lead to GWMO going tits up. They should have stuck to the relative safety of exploring & hoping to hit a motherload somewhere.
Finally, I have always been suspicious of the lack of visuals from GWMO for this processing plant facility. No photos in their presentations/ RNS for shareholders to get clear understandings o