RE: Canaccord view9 Jun 2021 12:15
It goes on:
Fast track ramp-up
Newcrest's nearby Telfer mine is soon set to exhaust, leaving significant processing infrastructure 'stranded'. Newcrest is currently fast-tracking the development of Havieron in order to avoid the cost of placing the Telfer plant on care and maintenance. We expect the Havieron Project to begin ramping up from late 2023/early 2024.
Low-capex development
We have conducted a benchmarking study of similar operations to estimate an appropriate unit capex rate of US$100/t of annualised throughput, which we believe to be ~30% lower than the capital cost for an operation which also requires processing plant construction.
Significant exploration catalysts
Havieron already has an initial Mineral Resource Estimate (MRE) of 4.2Moz @ 2.5g/t AuEq. The current 65,000m growth drilling program has intersected mineralisation in all of the holes drilled so far, and significant intercepts exist well below the current MRE. What appears clear, in our view, is that there is significant additional gold in Havieron than has been currently defined. Our simple observation of the drilling data to date, plus the known MRE geometry, suggests total resources could be a multiple of what has been defined to date; of course, whether that multiple is 2x or 5x is much more difficult to define at this stage. We do believe that ongoing reporting of drill results will continue to be encouraging this year, and will ultimately lead to significant upgrades in the overall resource base.
Valuation
Following strong performance in the share price over the past 12 months, 'valuation' is the strongest pushback we hear from many investors. We would agree that on the currently defined resource base, current trading levels are difficult to justify fundamentally (using either NPV or EV/oz). However, in this report, we outline a number of scenarios which we believe illustrate the modest level of exploration success required to justify significant valuation upside for this compelling equity story.