Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
FFC - noted. Thank you.
It was clear from reading the update last week and from listening to CF that more than one potential phase one funder is currently carrying out DD.
Any new party to the table will be carrying out technical, legal and financial DD which I believe (having been involved in the DD aspects of major resource/infrastructure projects many times during my career) should take 2/3 months, by the time you engage independent advisors, technical experts, get them briefed, let them engage, review material already in an online data room, do site visits, raise their own detailed questions, get responses, ask further clarification questions, prepare their reports etc. As they do that and feed their findings through that 2/3 month period to their instructing funders, the latter will be building their own model and beginning to sketch out what a term sheet might look like. It will need to be robust to take to the funder credit committees which will scrutinise at length the findings of the DD and a fully worked up term sheet/facility agreement. So - lots of work currently being done by any new parties to the table.
However, and in my view what could truncate the time period we will see before what could be a business transformative RNS, is that if the funder or funders come from one or a combination of the sovereign wealth funds, other major IIs or Sirius’ major contractors, we will see an accelerated process and the focus of their respective advisors will be on financial DD - checking the current cash burn rate, getting comfortable with cash flow projections to end Q1 and getting satisfied that Phase 2 funding can be done without difficulty. There will be some legal DD and some technical DD but nothing like what would be done by new funders. If that were to be the case we will hear from Sirius much sooner than end Q1 - either mid-Dec or mid-Jan is not unreasonable.
Tiggerman - can I encourage you to keep posting. I, for one, welcome your contributions which, without fail, bring balance and good perspective.
Thank you,
Foxhound
It is current market cap.
Also, despite what Trevor says, no predator can force us to sell our shares unless it already has acceptances for at least 90% of the issued shares.
Dear Admin,
I am tired of your feeble attempts to police those posters and their posts who are seeking, through misleading information or just plain lies, to frighten inexperienced private investors into selling their shares. I have therefore reported you to the FCA, not a random, meaningless poorly constructed complaint but a professional, formal complaint. I have taken counsel’s advice and believe that you are arguably contravening current legislation in permitting faceless people to attempt to destroy the share price and in essence trying to damage the company. His view is that you cannot remain as an uninterested bystander while such malicious persons are using your platform free of charge to peddle their lies.
Foxhound (but you know my name and what I do)
CF and his fellow directors will, based on his interview with The Times, by 31st October have completed their strategic funding review. I want to make 5 points arising out of what we heard today.
1. By 31st October they will know which options are fundable. My belief is that at this point (i.e. today) they and their advisors already know, based on the conversations they had with multiple funders/investors during the bond fundraising and subsequently. The execution phase will involve executing what has been confirmed orally or, more likely, what is sitting in a term sheet or term sheets - I think it is unlikely they will still be exploring funding options beyond the end of October.
2. I therefore take the view that the game changing moment will come later this month, not during the execution phase. The big question is what can be announced at the end of October. I think that CF will want to move on from the lows (in terms of SM’s prospects) of September and feed positive information on funding options into the market (he did that today) and we can therefore expect to see the SP rising towards the end of October and beyond that through the funding execution phase.
3. What is also critical from today’s disclosures is that despite the ongoing cash management (300 redundancies), cash is not as tight as the impression given by the (lack of) funding RNS - we now have until the end of April to settle on a revised build plan and execute the new funding plan.
4. As I mentioned in previous posts, CF and his fellow directors will want to agree the doable/feasible funding options as s matter of urgency to ensure that if an opportunistic and unwanted bid comes in, that they can publish a robust defence document stating that they have a revised funding plan which is viable and feasible so please back them to deliver on that and reject the third party bid.
5. If a business scales up to 1200 employees as quickly as SM did, it will realise very quickly who is really required and who is expendable - so while I feel sorry on a personal level for those who lost their jobs, SM is doing what I have seen many (financially sound) businesses do from time to time, namely restructure the workforce to reflect absolute need.
So I see lots to be encouraged about from today’s news. I continue to back this BOD and I expect them to deliver.
littlened - I think that we are some way off any likelihood of an administration/liquidation and am not sure why that is your focus as you have a beer looking over the Aegean but just to clarify in relation to planning - the PP attaches to the land, not the legal entity which applied for the PP.
Chrisatbirdies - thank you
JR - you have my vote also. You bring positivity at the end of a trading day. I will always defend your right to do so. And I would tick you up if my button permitted. LSE - sort this out. Your IT is underwhelming.
Sorry - meant stadiums and stadia
of and off
top draw and top drawer
.....and stadium and stadia
Green 73 - I would recommend you if the button allowed me to do so.
Maximus - believe me, I do listen to the other side of arguments. I have to do that in my profession. Happy to engage constructively if we both have the same ambition for the share.
Maximus 10 - given that you have sold most of your shares, why do you still hang around this board posting negativity like a bad smell?
The earlier post in which the poster contemplated that the market, realising that the drop had been grossly overdone, was trying to find a fair price for the stock, only told half the tale. Theirs will be a constantly evolving quest:
- the SP is still sitting at danger levels for the directors and is a sitting duck for an opportune bid in the knowledge that the directors are exploring finance options which are not yet ready for publication.
- whispers of positive fundraising discussions will set fire to the SP over these next few months - 50% increase at one point today and that was on no news
- a formal announcement of the chosen funding strategy, or even better, the signing of a funding term sheet or term sheets will have the same effect as the whispers, except that a series of price hikes will then be sustained .
And through it all, you might begin to feel sorry for the shorters who just didn’t figure any of this out. They were only trying to make an honest dime or two with minimal research. Any healthy market needs them however I suspect that we may not see their ilk again.
JR - I admire your resilience and enthusiasm but there are market abuse regulations which would substantially restrict the ability of any PI appointee to the BoD to relate price sensitive information to any other group of PIs so best to dismiss that as a notion.
In passing I also do not want the moment to pass without saying that despite the abuse you get from time to time, you should continue to bring your particular take on events and the prospects for SXX and its share price to those who read the messages on this BB. I suspect that there are many, many PIs who do not post but at a time of anxiety like this read posts such as yours for a positive take on the prospects of SM.
What anyone thinking of selling needs to realise is that the potential of the project is such that any intimation in an RNS, a newspaper comment or the rumour mill of positive funding news will cause a considerable rise in the SP from these levels, and the increase will be sustained over weeks. The SXX SP has history in doing that - I was on the journey from 2/3/4 to 9/10 within weeks - and all it had was a licence to drill in North Dakota and some rights in Australia which never did see the light of day. So sell if you must but for me there is every hope of a viable funding option being secured within the next few months. Good luck to anyone who decides to crystallise their loss and sell out. I will behave and do what the project’s major investors are doing this pm - nothing.
During all the negativity of this board over the last few days, CF will have been locked into discussions with his fundraising advisors, with the major investors (including two sovereign wealth funds) and will have begun to open conversations with potential strategic partners. We will see the results of that, ultimately in the RNS updates, (I expect they will begin to appear within weeks) and in the price action as rumours of interest appear. The SP will bottom out and begin to recover. I have already stated here that if CF and his BOD have not settled on a fundable option in the short term, they risk losing control if a bid lands from a major resource corporate and the lack of progress on achieving the funding blows a hole in their defence and the shareholders, IIs and PIs lose faith in the SM BOD and accept the contested bid. CF will be alive to this and I believe that he will leave no stone unturned in his efforts to find a funding solution.
I am relaxed tonight - We will see a lot of (SP raising) action over the next couple of months. In the meantime my 56 filters are working
52
Maximus - if you had any self-respect you would crawl back under a stone.