RE: RE RNS3 Apr 2019 08:40
Chairman's Statement
For the year ended 31 December 2018
Dear Shareholder,
Herewith Great Western Mining Corporation PLC's Annual Report and audited financial statements for the year ended 31 December 2018. Great Western remains in an exploration phase and therefore has no revenues beyond interest on cash balances, so is reporting a loss of €992,774 (2017: €696,294). Net current assets at 31 December were €689,976 (2017: €2,766,308) and there has been no significant change in the Group's financial position since the year end.
During the 2018 work season we conducted an active drilling programme on our claims in Mineral County, Nevada with encouraging results. Also, during the year, we increased our acreage position through acquiring strategically-interesting adjacent claims, strengthened our in-house team by taking on an experienced Chief Geologist and issued new shares for cash to help fund our programme. Costs are tightly controlled to ensure as far as possible that shareholders' funds are invested in exploration and appraisal rather than in overhead burn.
We believe that we have huge mineral potential in Nevada, but we are operating at high altitude in mountainous terrain with a relatively short annual weather window for drilling which means that our operations have to be carefully planned. We have already established a significant copper resource and we need to increase this considerably to achieve the potential for a commercial mining operation which will attract a major industry partner to assist with large scale development. On our M2 prospect, where we have done most of our drilling so far, the key to increasing our resources by an order of magnitude appears to lie in the Sharktooth location. If successful, this should have the effect of linking two identified copper zones, thus creating a significant and continuous combined resource of considerable size. However, during 2018 our drilling attempts at Sharktooth were not successful in reaching the target and we are now back to the drawing board and planning a different type of drilling programme. Frontier exploration often comes with disappointments but in this case the problems were operational, which can be overcome, rather than geological and the potential of the target remains as strong as ever.
As well as our large-scale copper prospects, we believe we have potential for commercially-recoverable precious metals, gold and silver, on our acreage. There are several long-abandoned gold mines within our claim areas and modern technology offers the possibility of re-entering these selectively and recovering commercial quantities of gold. We are currently working on the feasibility of doing this and are appraising suitable locations.
Great Western's shares are listed on AIM in London and the Euronext Growth market of Euronext Dublin. Euronext has recently acquired the Irish Stock Exchange and we welcome participation in this broader, European platfo
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