Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
Hi Tibbs - I think energy coming from the grid was going to be 50% cheaper than diesel generation at Sukari so they've got a bit of leeway for price rises.
Also if there are power cuts they are keeping the HFO gensets so can just fire them up again.
Either way they expect to recover the cost of grid connection in just over a year not to mention the benefit to the environment of not burning 10 million litres of diesel every month on electrical generation.
We live in crazy times.
Bad news on the economy means interest rates might be eased so equities and gold go UP.
If the economy does well rates might stay higher for longer so shares and gold go DOWN.
Good news is bad news and bad news is good news.
Bonkers.
Hi Pam, welcome to the world of Centamin share ownership! I've been holding/trading this one for a couple of years and the price has ranged from 76p-125p visiting both extremes or close twice in that time. Many holders here made a lot of money when the shares hit £2 in 2020 but others also bought in at those levels and are pretty fed up, to put it mildly
FWIW I think the share price sinks on news of regional political instability, any hawkish news on central bank rates (higher rates = lower GP) and high costs of production and exploration.
On the plus side this is a world-class asset churning out 14-15 tonnes of pure gold every year and it is about to get better. Building doropo ($400million perhaps?) and continuing EDX and pit maintenance mean the company is ploughing an awful lot of that cash back into the ground and - as you point out they - have to give half their profits back to the egyptian government.
If the shares are £1 the company is valued at 1£.2billion or so which is around 10 times profit. so my rule of thumb is if the shares are trading at much less than a quid they're a bargain and at much over £1 it's time to take a little profit but that's just me. Anyway it's an intersting share to own and I wish you the best of luck with it.
So the lift in miners today was down to the China's decision to cut their equivalent base rate by 0.5%. Apols if I missed this on here earlier but at least we now have a proper explanation for today's sudden boost and all the other miners too
Funny enough Horgan says somewhere in the Q4 results presentation that Q1 2024 is expected to be slightly softer than the rest of the year even though production guidance is split 50-50 between H1:H2... the thick plottens as my old boss used to say.
Tibbs with respect that's just not right. The open pit produced roughly 235koz of gold last year - contributing $450million in revenue to 2023. Yes the grade is low but the amount of ore coming out of it is colossal, almost 17 million tonnes.
The open pit produces more than half of the gold coming out of sukari, far from being a drag on profitability it is the heart of the operation.
Open Pit produced FY23 16.78 million tonnes of ore @ 0.78 g/t . They didn't process all of it but at a recovery of 88% that's 350,000oz right there.
Tony is spot on - they were stripping waste rock and found it contained gold at very low grade - an unexpected bonus - thousands of tonnes of worthless rubble became pay dirt and went straight to the dump leach. It did bring down the average grade from the open pit but it was a good thing.
Hi Dasut - the market often seems to take a while to notice - the morning of Q3 results 2022 which were stellar the SP was bumbling along at 83p but in the following weeks it took off to 125. Also interest rates staying higher for longer acts as a drag on future GP - maybe that's it, who knows?
Horgan says of little sukari: "Have we found a smallish plug of interesting mineralisation? That's one end of the spectrum. The other end is have we nicked the top of a LARGER SYSTEM that's then going to have legs to depth and along strike?
(disappointingly) "We've got no idea at this stage (but) we are very keen to follow up. If it's 300,000oz at 1.2g/t it's going to be accretive to the mine plan and we will take it on from there. If it's bigger than that then EVEN BETTER."
Tantalising stuff!
Ah mhenderson you have form on here after correctly saying there was a production shortfall in Q3 well ahead of time, and I was one of those to pooh-pooh what you said - apologies - I hope you're right this time as well.
I actually got as far as 42.40 and then he said:
"At the margin the drain of physical gold is structurally impacting the imbalanced, ring-fenced asymmetric-long over-the-counter short-futures envelope."
Just looking at the Little Sukari drill results and in particular LSRC030.
46m @3.3g/t is pretty tasty - but look at what else was down that hole -
1m at 60.1g/t - that's two ounce per ton in old money!
2m@47.35 g/t
2m @46.35 g/t
1m@34.6
12m@1.84
21m@1.14
25m@1.07
That's just one (admittedly their best) RC drill hole.
The deposit is about 200m long by not quite 100m wide and open at depth. Small but tantalising...
That's great to hear Dasut thank you. As a mining newbie these drill results looked really positive to me, so it is good to have that suspicion corroborated by someone with some industry experience.
Let's hope the Q4 results give us a boost.
CO2 in the ocean turning it acidic so its killing off coral reefs? We are conducting a mass global experiment in carbon dumping and no-one, not you and not me, knows for sure what the ultimate result of that will be?
Until fusion comes along we're going to need a mix - renewables and fossil fuels - look at the power model at Sukari - less oil in the mix would be better.