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Sausage - we've all been telling ourselves that the next RNS would be a game changer for years.
There has to be an underlying problem with the mining that they simply aren't telling us. We have struggled to get to any level of economies of scale since 9th October 2017.
Perhaps there's a reason 270+ million tonnes of coal has simply been left in the ground since the 1920's and 30's.....
The fundamental issue for me is what is actually stopping them getting to upwards of 5,000t per month.
If you believe their talk and our RNSs, we have the equipment and resources in place to do it.
So, why can't we achieve it? We've changed BoD, management personnel etc etc etc and still pretty much the same.
What is actually going wrong, or is that a question too far that they really don't want to answer while they're taking their salaries?
It is continued smoke and mirrors - that's how it comes across - and that's why the market has little confidence in us as a company.
The EDL annual Confirmation Statement, that all Limited companies have to submit to Companies House, has a comprehensive list of all our shareholders.
T72 - yes, it's an update but it doesn't really suggest any significant progress. We've had RNSs like this for years. Disappointing, again.
Hopefully they have found something similar to the Cullinan diamond in amongst all our coal.....
I think a good start would be to get the Zambia - Tanzania interconnector built.....
In all honesty Esquimo, there is no funding for a CFPP and we would be 5yrs plus away even if we were at the point of kicking it off in earnest again. And then there is the small issue of how we continually feed a CFPP with enough coal to ensure it is on grid all the time. That is possibly a bigger challenge as things stand. I genuinely don't think there is much hope left on that avenue of our journey.
The key for me here was diversification, which seems to have stalled somewhat since the fund raise and a potentially very interesting associated RNS of 5 May 2021.
It's been another pretty wasted year, more shares issued, minimal real progress, contract mining on then off etc and a further decimated share price.
We were 25p a share exactly 12months ago....
All that aside, hope everyone has a restful Xmas. I was going to say "and a prosperous New Year" but not sure that's quite the right phrase for us share holders. GLA
Interesting RNS from Kibo, even more interesting that there is no move in the share price. Probably says a lot of what the market thinks of CPP MOUs actually turning into reality.
The other slight moot point is the need for large and consistent supplies of ready coal to feed a power plant. We have neither, yet. GLA
A few "if"s in there esquimo...!
We're looking oversold, so let's hope for a slight upward trend. No more wishy washy news please BoD.
GLA
"Whats another year?"
Unfortunately a fund raise if we're not careful.
Need that bid to hold today. GLA
Well, let's see how the market reacts to that.
In one sense I can't complain because we have the promised update.
Not sure it's quite what I was expecting though.
New BoD, same old issues?
Yes, we have a new BoD, but until we get a production update with some tangible figures, it is still all noise at the moment. That's really where the market is at, hence the very slight drift back in share price with a bid now of c11.5p.
Fingers crossed.
GLA
I've been a bit off grid this week but great to have positive updates from Noel, podcast and RNS.
We need to keep up the momentum and most importantly deliver those numbers. Cash is king.
GLA
Straight from the interims, the administrative expenses are £70k per month - they were more or less the same in 2021. If you look in the annual report the Administrative costs are broken down by item. There's £250k in salaries alone in there..... it costs lots of money to run an AIM listed company.
Subbing to Brahma wont reduce any of that.
As things stand, we need £70k a month from our coal revenue to break even as a company.
Bullish - a paper loss is only a real loss when you sell. I've no doubt those who have been here any significant amount of time and not traded will be 90%+ down. I've been relatively lucky, although my trading gains and reduction in my paper losses have been slowed somewhat since we consolidated in January last year. Share price volatility is a traders dream.
It's easy to say to people "why don't you sell up and move on" - it may be much harder to do that in practice.
Therefore, I suspect a fair few on here, like me, are hoping for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow result...it might come, it might not. At $10 a tonne income, we might be waiting a bit longer yet.....but that's the AIM casino gamble, isn't it? GLA
Like I said to Bullish yesterday, it's not the personnel.
The pure hard facts of the figures from the BoD around revenue share and our underlying costs to run Edenville is that we are, in our current form, unsustainable as a business.
Our administrative expenses are way too high. It needs a serious turnaround in the next few months and without it, as I have alluded to previously, there undoubtedly needs to be a placing at some point to sustain the economic model.
The only way any longer term holder could possibly be anywhere near break even is if they have traded, at very high risk.
Afternoon Diggerman and trust you are well - any gossip from Africa?
Agree with that esquimo.
If you look at Current Assets in the Interims, the Inventories is the value of stockpiled assets at production cost (not sale value), which accounts for ROM, Washed coal and Fines stockpiles. It is broken down in the annual reports as a value against each of those three as it is required to be done like that for audit sign off, but in the (unaudited) interims it is just added in as a total value.
You could do a reasonably complex calculation from the P&L to work out what the value of those assets is in terms of sales, but given our costs of sales versus revenue from the accounts since we started washed coal sales, you might actually come up with a negative figure....! The annual results indicated we had the following
ROM - £453; Fines - £134,756; Washed coal - £7,512
That (along with previous annual reports) suggests that most of stocked coal is normally fines.
Bullish - no, that's not how you read a P&L
The cost of sales is all costs associated with the day to day operational elements of the mining, so that includes salaries of our foreman, drivers etc.
Admin expenses would include anything required to actually run the company (exec salaries, legal expenses, costs associated with being AIM listed etc etc)
If you sub out the mining you technically reduce your cost of sales to zero, but have negligible impact on admin costs.
So, at 4k tonnage per month we should just about break even (net), according to our latest interims - and that also assumes we get $50 per tonne at the gate....
If we only get $35, it will take us c7.5k tonnes to break even.
Bullish - but it's not about the personnel, it's about the business model. I have said many, many times on here about the importance of getting economies of scale and actually heading towards profit.
The other way to look at it is to consider what that revenue share agreement might yield.
Let's say we get to 4,000t in a month - if we sell the coal at $50 (which is the upper "robust" value from the Bod) we will make $19 ($10 plus 60% of $15) - that's $76k or roughly £70k. Our Admin expenses from the last six months amounts to, oh, roughly £70k a month. So that suggests that on the current forecast we breakeven (net) as a company at 4,000t per month assuming all operational (or gross) costs sit with Brahma and assuming we get top gate price.....if we only sell at $35 then by a rough calculation we need to get to c7,500t per month to break even....and those tonnages need to be an average over a 12month period not just during the dry season.
We now have the rainy season approaching which means we are very much in the lap of the Gods and, as SoS rightly points out, the BoD already seems to be warming us to the fact that the next six months might not be pretty.
It's a pants update. Really.
Bullish - someone must be paying you!
Remember we outsourced our operations for 4months of that interim period......yet, look at the gross loss on operations
It's dire, by any stretch of the imagination.