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£110m market cap? I would say that is only possible if a Zulu JV is landed and finance secured. Pilbara got to around £1bn post-finance and whilst plant procurement was underway. On that basis, I suppose £110m+ isn't that unrealistic.
I would suggest the 12months timeline to be highly unlikely though :)
Who knows what will happen next Sam, but if you look at the market cap and the potential, I think there is a still a significant opportunity here.
When the RHA electrification finishes, we should be getting that back to operation.
Hopefully some money from Circum should be realised in the next 6 months.
Zulu EPO and then - I hope - some JV, financing or sale.
Between now and those things happening... god alone knows
I wish I shared your enthusiasm CF. If George says something like 'could', I read it as 'almost certainly will not'.
On Zulu we still need to get the hell on with a revised drill campaign to get the resource properly described. The EPO just gives us a larger license area and in theory yes, it makes it more attractive, but for me, it's still a low-value proposition, so any partner is going to hammer us. I have no answer though - waiting to progress at Zulu until Circum or until RHA is providing income profitably will probably leave it too late.
Hey CF. I'm with you on Circum valuation being greater than the book value. However, I absolutely do not anticipate the funds from any sale/IPO to be returned to shareholders in anything like the amounts we'd like. Surely PREM will use a significant portion to progress the projects, rather than just 'pay us back'. Just my opinion of course bud
Chippy, oh I’m not suggesting for a moment that things are particularly better than they’ve ever been. I’m of the opinion my cat could do a better job running this company.
You make a good point. The decline shaft contractors will be a private company, so the hit there may well be higher than 30%. ZESA is state owned.
I’m looking forward to the day the Zim dollar comes back and I can finally use the 100 trillion dollar note I bought from eBay half a decade ago
I think it’s in the trade off studies etc. His point is that in real terms it’s gone up 30% from what we budgeted. When we thought we would use USD it was x. Now we are using the snappily labelled RTGS, it is 130% of x. The currency switch hasn’t had that bad of an impact on our costs, domestically at least.
fish, the only counter I'd make to your points there is that the contractors have no alternative. The only official currency is the one we have - they cannot be legally paid in any other way. Now, there will no doubt be a significant shadow market in USD, hell, any other currency. But the contractors can't really run their entire company on the shadow market can they. They can't pay all their costs in USD, including wages etc. This still has to be played out - I hope it starts to improve the situation for the average Zimbabwean, and by extension Prem!
Everything else you posted, I agree with!
I'd argue that it's barely news. Most of that is like announcing that Coronation Street is on later. No shit.
Thank you MTL, some interesting responses there. The copy/paste was a bit confusing at first, as it's not abundantly clear where his replies start.
Frankly, the status is exactly as one would guess if just using common sense. I found the bit about 'revenue generating acquisition' alarming though. I get the theory, buy something that is making money, it will cost a load, but it's going to pay back and then provide profit. That's the assumption. In my opinion, it is highly risky. Whilst the pure sums will make sense - buy something for $10m that makes $2.5m per year, after 4 years it's pure profit, that ignores the fact that it has to be adequately managed, costs cannot increase, sales revenues cannot decrease - we would take on another thing to worry about at a time when we are already struggling.
Our constraints will not be lessened by buying an operating project, quite the opposite.
If it turns out that there is a cheaper method to produce lithium, then why is that something to be worried about? I'm not clear whether they are talking about the processing plants, or the extraction. But either way, the methods will become standard in the fullness of time, as information leaks out. The risk to PREM is that this doesn't happen until after we've commissioned an old fashioned method of whatever it is.
Luckily for us, PREM is about 500 years away from even finishing the DFS, so we can sit here worry free about this one. Finally something to cheer about.
We won't even be using lithium by the time we get funding.
We'll probably have evolved into cyborgs, powered by some energy source we mine from the middle of stars.
You guys seem to have the opinion that the government is a conscious, sensible entity. That is not the case in any country. The RHA debate has been ongoing for a long time with the various ministries and gov officials. The relationship between the operator (PREM) and the government regarding RHA is very different to Zulu.
On Lithium, the government are simply promoting beneficiation - which every government would ideally want. Nobody wants to ship raw materials to another country to be made into tools and then sold. Making the tools (or batteries) in-country and then selling obviously employs more people and makes more tax money.
The $6m is categorically to pay off some of the balance of the RHA loan account and will be used for RHA. Drilling at Zulu is already ongoing but we are very likely going to need investment there to progress on the various studies for the DFS. Perhaps that will come from RHA profits (unlikely) or Circum (who knows). Frankly I would rather raise the money with an issue once we have climbed a bit off the back of $6m / RHA. Getting moving sooner is more important than delaying
I suppose the contra to that CF, is that no RNS at all would almost certainly be worse than one confirming we have finally agreed all formal particulars with Zimgov.
GL
You misunderstand me - tungsten is easy to process. But it's not easy to get a good mineral estimate. It's 'lumpy' in the sense that you might drill a few dozen holes that make it look like you're sitting on a motherlode or high grade crack, only to find that in general, the vast majority of what you own is an enormous pile of diffused crap.
Indeed, and tungsten is a notoriously 'lumpy' mineral.
I don't think anyone on here will ever buy a tungsten miner again. With WRES it may be worth selling on construction completion and then seeing how the commissioning goes before buying again. Having money loaned by big hitters is not a guarantee of success - as everyone involved in Drakelands / Hemerdon / Wolf (WLFE) will know all too well
To be fair gents, I don't think John's personal life is relevant to the type of person he is. I don't understand his motivation with PREM though - the massive majority of his tweets are bashing PREM, and not a lot else. There is nothing wrong with a dissenting voice, questioning things - even if they are awkward questions. However, he's not really interested in debate/discourse so I just ignore him.
In theory, buying into Ocado is not cheaper than starting from scratch. However, in reality, it would be as Ocado have already learned all of the lessons about this fulfilment model. I daresay M&S would make a bit of a mess of it. On top of this, the tie-in with Ocado provides very valuable expertise that could be used to update the rest of the M&S food supply chain, domestically at least. You would hope that this would lead to some significant improvements over the next 5-10 years.
To get your 12 pence, this share would be approaching a billion pounds in market cap. Stranger things have happened of course, but I would personally categorise that in the 'unlikely' list of scenarios that might happen in the next two years.
I would say £100m in those timescales is a far more realistic target, were the below to be in place within 2 years:
- RHA producing profitably (albeit modest)
- ZULU DFS done, funding secured
- RAN mine (HBR) producing profitably
I do think the HBR deal needs to be very carefully considered. Originally I dismissed it out of hand, but shareholders need more information on the project, current assets, delivery plan, timescale and all remaining costs to production. Without that we cannot very well make an informed decision on whether we feel the dilution is worth accepting.