RE: From align20 Dec 2018 06:09
The Honduras reverse integration deal provides a good blueprint of the style of future deals and the benefits that negotiating such contracts will bring to the company. Wishbone is seeking to help these artisanal/small-scale miners which currently may only be processing some 0.5t per day of gold ore from a team of ten miners using hammers, with gold recovery rates as low as 50%. With the equipment that the company supplies, 5t per hour of ore can be processed with 80-90% recovery as well as the benefit of not needing to use mercury to capture the gold.
Additional equipment is now being installed on site in Honduras for six months by its JV partner to bring the plant up to full specification. This will provide processing facilities in an area where there is high grade gold of 15-20g/t close to the surface. Moving ahead, the miners can concentrate on mining and leave the processing to Wishbone, which could generate in the order of a couple of kilos of gold a day. There is plenty of demand for the processing facility in Honduras, as it is the only one in the region.
Production costs are deemed to be probably less than US$400 per ounce at 5t/hour. So, after paying additional costs such as fees to the landowner, with gold at US$1,200/oz it is not inconceivable that the company and its joint venture partner could be sharing 20-30% margins of US$240 – 360/oz. The end result is that the company could conceivably receive something like US$250,000 per month, which would be transformational for lowly capped Wishbone. But this just marks the beginning of a much larger story.