The next focusIR Investor Webinar takes place tomorrow with guest speakers from WS Blue Whale Growth Fund, Taseko Mines, Kavango Resources and CQS Natural Resources fund. Please register here.
Hi, can anyone direct me to profiles on facebook writing from the ground how the project is progressing?
Where is the funding? This feels like sell the news event.
Versarien Cash Situation
Cash burn and commitment
- Versarien cash burn in the most recent reported 6 months period (1 Oct 2018 – 31 Mar 2019) was £1668k (operating activities & investing excluding acquisitions).
- Which means that the cash burn per month was £278k
- Versarien is providing a EUR 1.25m loan to Gnanomat according to the acquisition terms (25 Sep 2018). £641k (EUR 750k) drawn end of Sep 2019 and £427k (EUR 500k) drawn end of Mar 2020.
When did Versarien raise cash last time?
- Versarien raised cash last time 24 Sep 2018. The company raised £5.15m.
- Versarien cash position was app. £920k when the most recent placing took place. (Cash position was £6.07m 30 Sep 2018 according to H1 report resulting in an app. £920k cash position before the raise £6.07m-5.15m.
Conclusion
- Versarien raised cash last time when the cash balance was app. £920k
- Based on the last reported 6 months cash burn cash commitment Versarien has, the company estimated cash position would be around the £920k level in Jan 2020.
- Versarien has significant cash commitment to Gnanomat in Mar 2020 and would therefore need to address the cash situation soon.
I think its very likely that Versarien will have to raise equity soon to keep funding the corporate negative cash flow. The lack of a BIGT deal and any material revenue from graphene is all pointing in one direction the company will most likely have to raise equity soon.
Full details and references to accounts.
https://twitter.com/EasyBrent/status/1201841818834477061
When is the next placing coming, some estimates
https://twitter.com/EasyBrent/status/1201841818834477061
To me, all of this suggests that Monchetundra may not be quite as good as it is cracked up to be, as even at lower palladium prices I would still have expected it to be very profitable if all of the figures had stacked up and met expectations.
In terms of palladium itself, I remain to be convinced that the prices that we are currently seeing is anything more than a temporary bubble, as a lot of the rise has been as a result of a move away from diesel vehicles, including some of the emissions scandals we have had. Diesel vehicles tend to use platinum catalytic converters, whereas petrol cars use palladium ones, at the moment anyway. Given the current price difference at the moment, with palladium costing almost double platinum, at around $1,800/oz, I would be amazed if car manufacturers haven’t been working on the use of platinum instead for petrol vehicles.
Although that probably isn’t all that relevant anyway as I would be amazed if any sort of offer comes in for the assets at a surprise which even supports the current market cap of £72 million, following a pull back in the shares to the current level of around 2.7p.
By my reckoning the total warrants exercised so far have brought in just over £1 million in total funds, which at most would keep the company going for the next six months, and should see it through to the beginning of the mining season.
But even once mining begins I wouldn’t exactly expect to West Kytlim to be generating free cash flow, as even in 2018 when it produced a total of 165kg of platinum, and ignoring exceptional items, it still recorded a loss of around £1.5 million for the year.
I’m happy to be proven wrong on this one, but based on everything I have mentioned here something feels very wrong to me and even following the sharp pullback in the share price, I would still view this as one to avoid, or sell if you are sat on a profit, as I think there are a lot of games being played out behind the scenes.
I also think it will be interesting to see if Suschov remains as a non-executive director, given the new appointment and others who have been brought in. Plus of course what the update on the Sinosteel contract will include when that eventually materialises.
In light of the last two updates, and the way that they have dropped after the warrants had finished being exercised when I believe that they should have come much sooner, I’m not sure I would trust the company either.
In terms of Monchetundra, the figures for the resources might sound good on paper but it is worth remembering that just 555kg of that amount is currently included in the C1 reserves and resources category, with more than 44,000kg being in the inferred C2 category, and with very limited drilling having been carried out on relatively small areas of the licence.
That certainly doesn’t suggest to me that anyone would make a huge bid for the company until at a least a much more extensive drilling campaign had been carried out to prove up more of the resource – under the Russian resources clarification system, even C1is only based on estimates from a sparse amount of actual drilling and trenching, with the C2 being extrapolated across the whole resource from these same drilling results.
When it comes to the payment of a dividend, which Suschov mentioned, things start to look even more ropey as the basis of this seems to be a payment of $50 million from a Chinese company, Sinosteel, to Eurasia subsidiary TGK, under which its share of Monchetundra is held, and comes as part of an EPC turnkey contract which was announced on October 10 2016.
As part of this contract, $26.5 million was to be paid straight back to Sinosteel to cover TGKs 15% share of the EPC costs, with the remainder being used for advanced engineering and pit development work. The remaining $149.5 million that is expected to be needed for EPC comes in the form of a 10-year loan by Sinosteel to Eurasia. So I’m not exactly sure how it is expected that any of that money will be paid in the form of a dividend to Eurasia shareholders, as that would breach the contract.
Now this contract, which offers Sinosteel exclusivity for a period of ten years, also has a clause whereby the initial payments must be made within 36 months of the contract being entered into, so by my reckoning that expired early last month.
To me it seems very strange that there has so far been no update as to whether or not Sinosteel is still going ahead with this – you would have thought that it would already have done so if Monchetundra is actually worth the huge amounts being talked about.
The RNS from back in 2016 also mentions that Eurasia is in ‘advanced discussions with third parties for the sale or joint venture of the project’, and whilst I accept that palladium prices were a lot lower back then, you would have expected something to have already materialised if the project is worth a large amount.
Shortly after that EPC contract was announced, another RNS came informing the market that Canadian company, Lemuria, was conducting due diligence on the project to consider financing it via a royalty structure. Yet like so much of the other interest that has apparently been shown in Monchetundra, this also came to nothing.
The big rise was triggered by an RNS on October 24 that two large investment banks – CITIC in China and VTB Capital in Russia – were looking at strategic options for its assets, including the possible disposal of its assets, and with particular focus on its Monchetundra palladium asset, which is yet to reach the production stage.
The RNS was quick to point out that a couple of other recent palladium mining deals, including $2 billion for Sibanye and CAD$1 billion for NAP, which was recently acquired by Impala Platinum, and that the Monchetundra Kola Peninsula asset had a total resource of 15 million ounces of PGMs, mostly made up of palladium. What it didn’t seem to point out though was that both of these had been producing the metal for years.
This was of course jumped on by people on the bulletin boards and all sorts of share price predictions were being bandied about, some of which valued this tiny company in the billions of pounds. What seemed to be mentioned less though, but was contained within the original RNS, was that neither bank had actually signed an engagement letter.
At the start of this week a further RNS dropped clarifying that no engagement letters had yet been signed, and I do have to wonder if that was forced upon the company by AIM Regulation or the Nomad. Conveniently, this clarification was left until after pretty much all of the warrants had been exercised though.
That news certainly seemed to stall the share price, and there was more to come as well the next day when a further RNS was issued that Anthony Nieuwenhuys, the CEO of Lesego Platinum – which had previously visited the Monchetundra asset and the data – had been appointed as a non-executive director of Eurasia.
The same RNS also stated though that the company had no intention of entering into any agreement with Lesego.
There was also news on its producing West Kytlim asset which didn’t go down so well, as it turns out that only 66kg of platinum production had been approved by the authorities for production during the whole of 2019.
That seems very strange to me as that only equates to around 2,300oz of production for the entire year, yet Suschov had mentioned production of 200oz per day in at least one of his interviews.
Even more so when you consider that the interim results announcement stated that 55kg (1,770oz) of platinum had been produced between mid-May and mid-September, or an average of 445oz per month roughly. On that basis I would question whether the company was even producing platinum at all from West Kytlim at the time that Suschov gave the interviews, and it certainly wouldn’t have been anywhere remotely close to 200oz per day, given that it was averaging 15oz per day during the period up until the interim results were published.
Often pump and dumps only last a matter of a few days or even hours, but occasionally when it is more than just small private investors involved they can go on for a long period of time, and that certainly appears to have been the case with Eurasia Mining (EUA).
This does of course give opportunities to trade the rise, as long as you manage to get out before the drop comes, but ultimately the fundamentals play out and if something looks to have risen by far more than any news has justified, then almost inevitably they come crashing down to earth at some point, and those who got too caught up in the story and the crazy share price being predicted are the ones who tend to get stung the worst.
Some will be quick to point out that when I last covered this company as an avoid at the end of last month at a share price of 1.9p, it went on to more than double. That sort of move is impossible to predict – unless you happen to be one of those involved in driving the rise – and everything that I write is based on my perception of value, and whether or not any pieces of additional news can justify such a big increase.
In the case of Eurasia it appears that there has been far more going on than just a group of PIs pumping it, as the company itself was being incredible bullish in its RNSs and Twitter, and there were also a number of interviews – some of which, I would suspect, were paid for.
The sudden rise in share price from around the 0.5p level just so happened to coincide with a lot of the warrants being exercised, for a tidy profit, as well as non-executive director Dmitry Suschov first transferring 25.472% of his company – Deloan Investments which holds an 11.07% interest in the Eurasia shares – to Alexei Churakov for a nominal amount as an ‘incentive’ in his new role as a strategic advisor to the board of Eurasia.
Subsequently a further 10.42% of Deloan was transferred to Alexander Sushchev, also as an incentive for his new role as another strategic advisor to the Board, and also for a nominal amount.
Working out exactly what is going on with all of that is virtually impossible as many of the holdings companies involved are registered in the British Virgin Islands, where finding out any information about them seems to hit a dead end. I do wonder though if the two newly appointed advisors are subject to the same trading declaration rules as the directors would be.
That alone is enough to raise my suspicions, but at the same time some fairly outlandish claims were being made in interviews, especially with regard to potential dividend payments for shareholders and also the amount of platinum that the company was producing at its West Kytlim mine in Russia.
In the RNS 24 Oct when the company announced that they engaged CITIC and VTB they wrote:
"Eurasia, an established producer of palladium, platinum, iridium, rhodium and gold is pleased to announce that CITIC, one of China's largest investment banks and VTB Capital, one of Russia's largest investment banks (together the "Banks") have already started (even prior to signing their respective engagement letters)"
Have anyone asked the company if the engagement letter had been signed? Its been almost a month since the announcement so shouldnt they have signed the engagement letter by now?
The result looks very promising so far. Hopefully completed towards the end of the weekend.
slipanchor, any idea what the weather threshold is to start the testing?
Its 100% ramping, any potential buyer has no interest in a higher share price and they dont care if EUA BOD thinks about dividend policy or not. This is the most hard worked ramp by a AIM company in a long time. They are clear doing it so larger holders can reduce or the company is looking to raise cash.
Looks like the big seller in Polarean, Amphion is being cleared. If that is the case the stock could easily bounce above 20p.
What level of revenue do you expect in H1?
Flappingchicken, in the RNS it say that testing begun 20 Aug, while logging was done prior to that from 6 Aug "Cased hole logging and completion programmes were initiated on 6 August 2019 followed by well test operations which commenced on 20 August 2019. "
So they have indeed flow tested the well but still no volume worth reporting, clearly a bit odd.
Something dosent really add up in todays news, there was nothing stopping them from getting a flow rate from the gas and they had kit to flow liquid as well.
I think the decision to pay the back salary shows what Mr Kirk actually thinks about the company.
Its amazing that the NOMAD allowed QFI to put out todays news in an RNS as RNS should involve material information. A non-binding MOU with a tiny company with a balance sheet of £1.2m can not be seen as material news. But the NOMAD and the broker is doing what they can to support a placing ramp so they can collect their fees from the upcoming capital increase.
QFI will be running out of cash in 34 business days. The company has raised cash several time during its time on AIM but they have never been so close of running out of cash without having presented a solution to the market. I guess very soon if a financing solution isnt announced the NOMAD will force the company to put out an RNS disucssion the possible closing down of the company.
Clearly looks like the stock being pumped behind the seen so they can raise cash in some form before the company runs out of cash in October. On the 20 May investor call, Mike Kirk said that they are looking at structured financing solutions and someone asked if that was a death spiral, than Mike didnt deny that. The situation is very similare to AFC Energy. Pumped for no good reason and than death spiral plus placing killing the stock.