focusIR May 2024 Investor Webinar: Blue Whale, Kavango, Taseko Mines & CQS Natural Resources. Catch up with the webinar here.
Copper has always been the main asset. Seems he wanted to avoid a high risk binary play so had gold and then REE licences. In interviews last year he kept saying optionality. This year he's said good was ready to drill first. In other interviews and RNS he's mentioned involving VMS experts and on LinkedIn they've had another one come in for a field visit. This is the jewel in the crown, always has been, they've got a JORC estimate before any major drill so not a Greenfield like the gold was. Market looks at it like a crap shoot when it's had the most time and attention devoted to it.
Check out the AMC report. They've laid out the open pit game plan. Target of 5-6m tonnes of ore. Base case for open pit mine is a life of 5 years, NPV of $241m. Kazakhstan has lower power/labour costs. 2 nearby refineries (Glencore and KazZinc) with excess capacity. This doesn't factor in the underground ore or the rest of the licence. Scope for more discoveries and extra credits for PMs.
Stay away from the Lassonde Curve. https://twitter.com/DavidFi_/status/1677097285442781184?s=20
They've got cash for the copper drill, that's the big catalyst once they have a JORC, scoping study on deck and kicker of a discovery from the high priority targets. £1.45m at 31/12/22. If you read final results, work commitments on licences is like $500k. CEO basically working for free as whole BOD took a pay cut.
Working assumption is drilling starts soonish with results by end of year for JORC resource. However, if it's just a few holes then perhaps sooner but they'll need to update their Comms. REE is not dead but like the gold there's a load more work to do than current funds allow frankly. They can do more testing to find a commercial leaching process but seems they need to do more drilling as well to understand what they have as it's no longer a simple ionic deposit.