Member Info for JoeNinety

Thanks for this very comprehensive response.
As one might expect, the bulk samples are from existing or near-existing workings, the 'Jack Williams' floor and walls in this case, wherever that is.
Only the borehole cores can sample the deeper lodes and, as you say, the gold in very inhomogeneous (nuggety) so unless we hit a 'nugget' we might not see much. Hitting a 'nugget' would be quite unlikely if drilling across (close to perpendicular to) the seams - if we'd hit any so far, we'd probably know about it by now.
So the bulk samples might give us confidence to start mining but don't we need more, or a lot of luck with borehole cores, to give confidence to invest in mining at depth?

@andysel. Where is the bulk sample taken from?

Well, during the morning I could briefly have bought a round or two. Sadly, it's now Friday night and the beer money has been blown. In fact, I've ended up down (a bit).
Not to worry, I can spend part of the weekend trying to figure out how much cash we have and how much this exploration costs, and so how much money (if any) we need to raise from loans, placings or (maybe) gold production to fund another year. Is any of this written down anywhere?

... I bought some of these the other day and I'm actually up. I might treat myself to a pint to celebrate, but I won't have two or I'll be down.
I'm not sure why I took the plunge, but the management team looks pretty experienced and optimistic and talk a good talk on the videos I've seen. They look to have a logical and sophisticated approach and seem to have access to good assets in non-dodgy jurisdictions. However I'm not entirely sold on the viability of Welsh gold or any short term payback from the Greenland ventures, and the company seems to be spread a bit thin considering its size.
This makes them more of a medium to long-termer, and they have certainly been around for a while already though I struggle to see how they fund this. The balance sheet suggests they have a lot of assets and few liabilities, but also not much cash and no earnings. I'm no expert, but from my reading of the 2019 cash flow statement there wasn't enough in the bank to cover one years operation (even though all this exploration seems surprisingly cheap). But they still seem to be going strong a year later, as they have for years.
How do they fund their exploration and development? Does anyone know what the monthly cash burn is and where it comes from. Presumably the shareholders asked for cash or subject to dilution on a regular basis (another few hundred million shares issued each year for example) - or have I got this wrong?
If I am right, and there is nothing particularly wrong with this model in an exploration venture (in fact quite a few huge companies have been funding Covid, for example, with vast rights issues), how often are these calls and when is the next one likely to be?
Yes I know I should look into all this before stumping up the money, but there you go.

The sp was up at £3 when an April/May start was mooted. Sub £2 seems a big drop for a 1-2 month delay, or £6-12M more loss.
The delay could be until Autumn though, if docking at foreign ports is involved.
I'm back at my purchase price, so might top up. These are a bit of a roller coaster.

Isn't there anything better they could do with the money that would grow the company and so raise the share price by more than the value of the likely special dividend? You might have thought that there was some way of profitably using a cash mountain in this sector, though I have to admit that I have no suggestions myself.

I would not find it very appealing, as I'd rather see something. The Scottish highlands, Orkey and Shetland would probably be good enough, or even spectacular coastline - Norwegian fjords maybe, Greenland ice sheet before it melts.
The way vaccinations are going, a trip to Israel via Malta could be feasible.
However, if the price is right you can probably easily fill the ships continuously just cruising around and eating, and even if they don't make much money it must be better than the £x million per month loss of having them empty.
However, aren't the itineraries for this year already fixed and filling up with prospective passengers?

By the way, I agree with your congratulations. All involved have made fantastic progress and it is a great cause for optimism.

Succinct, but a little uninformative. Vaccinated passengers might still be able to transmit. One or two cases amongst the crew, particularly if requiring evacuation, could be disruptive and bad for publicity. The likelihood may be low, but isn't it one of the risks that the management have to balance? Do they have measures in place e.g. crew pre-isolation and testing, passenger testing, to minimise the risk?

Unfortunately, don't the crews have to be vaccinated as well as the passengers. It could be a while before they are done.

Well, some of us wish we hadn't just bought at £2.60 - it looked like it had bottomed out for a while, but timing the market is impossible. Hopefully they'll make a few quid one day.

It may be a naïve question, but I was wondering what the shares would be worth based on two operational cruise ships alone.

They were estimated to bring in £40M PBITD per ship, so £80M per year in total (see 'Musings on cruise').

I think that they cost about £500M to build (£250M each ... roughly).
- Writing them off over 25 years, depreciation = £20M per year.
- Interest at 5% per year = £25M per year.
- Tax at 20% on the profits = £16M per year.

Net profit = £80 - £(20+25+16) = £19M per year.

This is 13p per share (if 140M shares), assuming no other costs and assuming the ships sail (they are a bit of a dead weight when, as now, they don't).

If you want to match the return on a decent buy-to-let (5%) the ships are worth about £2.60 per share long-term.

So the present £2.70 for the whole company (insurance, travel and cruises) seems pretty reasonable if the other parts are not loss making.
However, the company does seem to have made huge losses in previous years, and the ships have been idle for a year building up maybe a £50M loss (£25M interest plus staffing/maintenance costs), so I don't suppose there will be much of a dividend from cruising any time soon.

I think I understood this, but didn't '...looks excellent at 96% (68% plus 28%) of target this means revised target is £291.6m' mean '...looks excellent at 48% (average of 68% and 28%) of the two-year target. This means revised two-year target is £140/0.48=£291.6m' .
i.e. I get the same figure but in a different way.
You go on to say that this means £300 per day ticket price. Having independently looked at the cruise brochure I estimated (conservatively) about £200 as a basic per day ticket price. I'd believe £235, but there might have to be a lot of extras to get to £300.
Something seems inconsistent, but I might just be a bit slow.