Member Info for Andii

Tiger Alpha subnet is earning 14 TAO per day.

Subnet 127 had some type of beauty Ai ready to launch straight away. They are struggling to fill their subnet slots with miners and validators and their subnet market cap is considerably smaller than the Tiger Alpha subnet.

Suggests to me its worth the wait for a superior subnet Ai offering yet to be announced

Another 2 possibilities;

3. BAO steel bulk materials ship requires minimum of 20kt shipment in one go and it wont be in port until second half of july

4. Someone from Marula are stalling to take advantage of the rising manganese price

A day or two?

Looks like we may have a valadator online. TAO Strategies, came online 4 days ago

https://taostats.io/validators/5Ea9VTMYG72UwxVHgjhq8FWS9n7eSaCuPZ1rfAvUYy5j8orM/weights

Are these manganese stockpiles processed or unprocessed?

https://x.com/JB_MiningAfrica/status/1943307298165690694?t=y4lmLjRWLa6HT2c4BGRbaQ&s=19

Of course Marula have added some key corporate managers recently and there is the potential for Blesberg to begin initial shipments of sorted spodumene and a selection of the high grade byproducts at pilot scale whilst the full multi mineral battery metals project is developed.

Then dont forget the other projects

Kinusi phase 2. Graphite. Rare Earths. Cobalt/gold. Manganese. Lithium Brine. More TBA

Blesberg

Negatives

Its over 2.5 years late delivering revenue. It appears to have gone through at least 2 offtake agreements without any meaningful deliveries having been made. The Tomra processing plant was 9 months late being delivered and still hasnt been installed. The price of 6% lithium spodumene has dropped from a peak of around $3000/t to current $650/t. The price of container logistics in south africa has risen substantially during 2024. Drilling results haven't been released yet despite being completed around January 2024. Competent persons report over a year late. Details of the phase 2 JV agreement for a higher value lithium sulphate production plant have not been released yet 9 months after first being announced and costs/JV terms/timeframe for a higher value battery grade lithium product aren't yet known. Phase 1 simple DSO production is less favourable politically as time goes on despite this being the original plan when lithium spodumene prices were up at $3000/t. We dont have a new offtake agreement for the new suite of 10 minerals. We dont know what further Capex is required to begin initial production.

Positives

The whole project has only cost around $2m capex so far. It has a minimal opex due to being in a care and maintenance. Both Tomra and Rados xray sorter machines are available and have been used to test different configurations. There are already grade sorters, crushers and a fleet of excavators on site. The mining rights have been extended from initial 5hectares and 2 years to 1000hectares and 25 years. Initial negotiations with a 3rd party hard rock mining contractor are underway. Multiple re-assays have resulted in over 10 minerals (some very high value) being detected up from the initial 2 or 3 minerals initially sampled for from 2023 drilling campaign. A historical tungsten mine to the north has been added to the mining licence and tungsten is a high value product which can suitably be processed by our Tomra x-ray sorter. The lithium spodumene stockpiles are still there at surface ready to be mined. The CPR will now be a much larger report due to the JV, extra minerals, extra power requirements, longer mine life and increase to the size of the mining licence of over 200 times.

****

We likely added a year to Blesberg timeline due to spending capital on manganese projects. I think we probably need to wait until either we start generating our own FCF from other projects before initial production can start at Blesberg. There will be extra processing plant required to deal with the byproducts. What this will cost and what the timelines will be won't be known until the CPR is complete and even this isnt definitive. No JORC resource exists for the project so extra drilling will be required.

There will most likely need to be a 3rd party funding package announced to supply the Marula share of the Capex/working capital requirements for the entire Marula project alongside announcement of terms for the propo

Jason's past.

So he has not successfully delivered a profitable mining project to date but has moved on to projevts which have proven non viable. Out of every 1000 mining projects, less than 0.1% make it into production. This doesn't necessarily mean that Jason is a conman. He may have not selected the best project. A commodity price may have dropped substantially. He may have been let down by technical advisors/geologists. For every failure, the chance of future success increases. Marula is only 3 years old as a comapany which Is too short a timeframe to write off a CEO.

Kilifi-

The current processing plant isnt that old. The existing plant was being supplied by local manganese miner(s). It is not known what (if any) offtake agreement was historically in place. It is not known what the original plant design capacity was. It is not known the financial situation of the existing owners (did a capex overspemd/debt/drop in managnese price cause the project to be mothballed)

Marula have come in and spent over $500k developing extra processing steps/wash plant at Kilifi

Marula have agreed multiple 3rd party supply agreements of up to 25kt per month of manganese to Kilifi

Manganese prices currently around $4.6/DMTU vs $3.7/DMTU around March 2024 when Marula would have been doing DD on the project

Baosteel, world's largest steel producer have a 5 year off take agreement available to take all the manganese produced

Marula are exploring high grade manganese zones at surface with up to 70% manganese which exceeds the 25% manganese being delivered by 3rd parties

So plant redesigned and now 100% owned by Marula

Production capacity likely increased

Wet commissioning underway

5 year offtake agreement in place

Multiple supply agreements in place

Higher grade manganese available in the area with no drilling or blasting required

Risks?

We dont know if the plant can consistently deliver 37% manganese

We won't know the Opex until production is ramped up

We can't control the grade of the material being delivered and dont know what price we are paying for it

The manganese price has been volatile the last 12 months

Upsides

100% owned

Manganese prices can go up

Marula can go to double shifts and deliver 20kt per month instead of the initial 10kt per month

There is access to much higher grade manganese in the area with a future higher value battery grade material being considered

Let's say the average delivered is only 15%, below the grade we hope and only 20kt is delivered

Let's assume production and delivery costs come in at double that quoted ($250/t not $125/t)

This would bring in a revenue of around $20m with costs of $2.5m.

So potential very conservative profit of $17.5m a year.

Let's assume phase plant costs $3m and drilling/infostructure $4m. That's $7m capex to deliver $17.5m profit This results in an IRR of over 100%. If average grades from a phase 1 drill campaign were lover than hoped, they could still selectively only drill the high grade zones and still have a 15year mine life.

Due to AUO/Quinton exiting the 3.75p and 10p share agreements, there is around a £4m development funding gap to drill and develop Kinusi. The phase 1 plant was quoted as costing $1.4m in capex. Parallel phase 1 drilling program and infostructure development a further estimated $2m.

So what's happening now? Let's consider a few scenarios

1) Marula have been let down by AUO and haven't been able to pay for the phase 1 plant and Kinusi continues to be mined in an artisinal manner producing low grades with minimal stockpiles with no offtake parties

2) Marula have started paying for phase 1 plant but continue to mine with diggers and local grading/sorting with low and high grade stockpiles being delivered to multiple parties on a trial basis (with lack of storage affecting grade)

3) Marula have paid or will pay for phase 1 plant which is almost complete and the project is being up manned whilst in tandem mining low/medium and high grade copper with offtake discussions continuing with two or more preferred offtake parties who are having deliveries ramped up.

There is a risk here, of course there is.

1)someone is claiming fraud on a 60T trial shipment

2)we haven't done any drilling

3)we haven't seen historical reports, historical assays, no detailed feasability studies have been released

4)Marula haven't developed analysis mines historically so their technical ability is still unproven

But there are upsides;

1)Average grades are estimated to be above 3% with a claimed 25% or higher DSO copper product having historically been delivered

2)The exploration target is around 50MT at 3% copper with higher grade veins visible

3)There is gold as a byproduct

4)Phase 1 mining and transportation is estimated at around $115/t with 20-25%% copper ore worth around around $1200-1600/t.

5)Phase 1 production design is for a volume of 24ktpa of high grade material

https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/MARU.PL/kinusi-copper-mine-operations-update-8zo88pqnic2vlpg.html

https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/MARU.PL/kinusi-copper-mine-operations-update-kvcs7h16n2dryu9.html

Dee, kinusi (we are told) has been selling high grade ore on an artisinal basis for many years. The mine was historically able to operate. This was done on a DSO basis.

How profitable they were I am not sure but Marula saw an opertunity to increase production, automated and reduced costs. Do we have historical reports and assays to confirm this? Not in the public domain. But Takela know what they were mining, what it visually looked like, volumes and price achieved, and we would hope there would be some type of historical assay results for the final product sold. Apparently they were discarding product up to 8% copper content.

Several scenarios may have played out here-

1) The claims are true and the assays were forged with Takelas knowledge

2) The claims are true and the assays were forged with Takela and Marulas knowledge

3) There was a mix up and a low grade material was sent by mistake

4) A bigger offtake party came along and the 60T high grade material was sent to them instead

5)The material was assayed then exposed to the elements and oxidised/dropped in grade

6)The claims are false and an attempt at reputation damage

Marula operate a profit share agreement with Takela for 70% of the profit. Takela are still the licence holder and operator of Kinusi. I believe that there is limited liability directly to Marula but can bet that if mistakes have been made by Takela management that Marula management will take this matter very seriously and carry out closer oversight.

We have been told in RNS that basic metalurgical testing has been done for phase 1 copper production at copper. We have also been told in RNS that product is being stockpiled amd sent off to multiple offtake parties. We have also been told that at learlt one of the offtakers came to site to carry out independent testing of the product which came back higher than expected.

There has however been a counter claim on social media by one of the neighbouring miners that 60tonnes of copper product was delivered and that the assay results were forged and the true grade was not above 20% as agreed but closer to 6%. They also claim that there are no more than 5 persons mining at Kinusi.

Marula then counter claimed in RNS that there was a disagreement with one of the potential parties over terms and that this lower grade material would instead be stockpiled.

So Kinusi was operating by takela as an artisinal mine

Marula came in around 2023 and carried out geo rock samples and basic metalurgical testing. The original plan was to start production and drilling Q1 2024 using cash from Quinton/AUO

Available cash and Marula management time in 2024 was directed from Kinusi instead to 2x manganese plant aquasitions. (Larisoro and Kilifi) Kinusi was delayed whilst a full phase 1 and phase 2 report was completed by Yana - ex copper 360 manager. This was complete but Marula had no cash to fast track a new design of phase 1 plant which would feed into phase 2 at a later date

6 companies where Jason or his affiliated company GMI have either passed on projects at IPO or followed up with large funding commitments in exchange for shares. GMI have certainly been pulling out the cheque book a lot recently going by the RNS's

Hi dcode. Jason had some amazing success and some hard lessons whilst in Australia. Its discussed pretty openly in this interview from 9 months ago

https://youtu.be/-z9aOSZdZhM?si=xakjPIJFnwBcVVL8

Jason was never found guilty in a court of law and resigned from the footie tram was it Perth Glory. Anyway, you should find the video interesting

Here is Kilifi being wet commissioned back in may

https://x.com/JB_MiningAfrica/status/1921422962063704066?t=DMxIhqiIKa2DLaXVebLkXg&s=19

Could it turn Marulas fortunes around?

The All In Sustaining Cost per ton of manganese was quoted at $99/ton

I did some calculations based on 10KT per month and varying manganese prices

Based on $99/t costs, 10,000t a month and 37% grade;

$3/DMTU (October low) = $111/t revenue, $12/t profit or $120k a month FCF

$3.5/DMTU (average this time last year) = $129/t revenue, $30/t profit and $300k a month FCF

$4/DMTU (mid january) = $148/t revenue, $49/t profit and $500k a month FCF

$5/DMTU (10th feb) = $185/t revenue, $86/t profit and $860k a month FCF

$5.5/DMTU (latest tweet/price) = $203/t revenue, $104/t profit and $1.04m a month FCF

Price quoted in the March RNS was $4.61/DMTU

"The 5-year Budget has used manganese prices of US$4.61 per dry metric tonne unit of manganese and a US$:KES exchange rate of 127"

Current price is $4.71/DMTU

https://www.jupitermines.com/tshipi-manganese/tshipi/manganese-price-information

Ramping was just one element tho. I listed 4 reasons

True legal wolf. But consider -

The nature of TIR and absence of a KIID form to allow trading on all brokers has been an issue for over 6 months

TIR do holdings many assets so could technically be classed as an investment company

There have been a lot of social media ramps

The share price went from 0.1p to 0.5p in the space of a week

A question worthy of the AGM. Does TIR intend on disposing some of its mining assets holdings to facilitate a change in classification of the company from a holdings company to a technology/crypto/Ai company.

Dcode, I'm not sure where all the cash comes from but the GMI company registered on companies house isn't the main entity with the cash. That resides in Kenya. There was actually a historical RNS from GCAT whereby GMI were due around $500k tax bill but they seem to be able to offer up cash quite freely so must have access to capital somehow.

I know they owned mining assets which were transfered into Shuka (unicorn too maybe?), Neo, and they subsequently got large % holdings of each company. You would need to go back to the prospectuses at IPO time for each company to read further. Anyway, those shares are still held and GMI continues to offer cash via loans/loan notes + warrants so either they have some wealthy donours in Kenya or their other investments (property, technology) + Jason's and his partners wages/personal wealth are substantial.

As GMI is a private company in Kenya, it is difficult to know.

What's the warrant overhang?

We have around 5B shares today so new total would be 500m

5,000,000,000 x 0.0027 (0.27p) = £13m which is roughly our current market cap