RE: Circular31 Jul 2025 11:02
"unlikely you will answer as you don't tend to".. and "I will answer your question when your mate Gotreal answers mine?" Whose mate?? There you go again.... "Too many people are too willing to twist the truth to paint the picture they want people to see."
IN ANSWER, for the company to focus on copper and to do so by owning the fundamental resource of production, as is being enacted with the tailings and waste stockpiles and the open pit mines, unlike in S Africa where we own none of the sources of primary production, is IMO the right thing to do, so the strategy is 100% correct. Given that moving into Zambia, an entirely new country, jurisdiction and business environment was a courageous and high-risk thing to do, it was highly likely and to be expected that any early stage plans would alter considerably over time. The realities of the new territory, how long licensing takes, what the reality of operating at ground level really is, the reliability and quality of the infrastructure, how business practices work, how long building relationships with local communities and local and central government will take, all of the myriad factors that a major industrial business has to consider and accommodate have to be learned and adapted to. And the business MO will evolve as opportunities and challenges arise and are exploited or have to be overcome. The chief question is how much you should expect the business to anticipate where and what those opportunities might be or what those challenges might require to overcome them. And this is basically where opinion here is so divided. Personally, I would rate the execution of building out the copper operation as 6/10, given the circumstances, ie Africa/COVID/inflation. We have certainly made some major foreseeable errors but have likewise managed to obtain, at scarcely credible costs, copper resources which have the potential to be worth tens of billions of dollars for a tiny fraction of that, and have built/ are building the infrastructure needed. I invested here because the company demonstrated in S Africa that it could take what everyone else at the time considered worthless and make it very valuable in producing chrome and PGMs. After a while others saw that and started to do similarly. The major error in SA was in not acquiring the sources of production, the waste rock and ROM material, meaning they are now too expensive, giving the advantage to those companies that do own them and recognise the value they represent, for which they charge, fully. The company demonstrated its processing capabilities in SA and it is that skillset that will, I believe, make the copper operation successful in Zambia. That Leon's optimism, vital for the CEO, the leader of any company to possess, has been his weakness from a PR perspective is plain to see, and his forecasts have too often been based on shaky foundations. This is I believe changing with the new FD onboard.
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