Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
Morning all. Quiet here. I've emailed Ascendant regarding their financing and whether any progress had been made etc. I have received nothing back, not even an acknowledgment of my email (which I have no sent three times!).
Thanks for the link - an interesting watch. He seemed to skip CAP which I'm keen to have an update on. I am also waiting on an update on Ascendant's TBC financing arrangements for the drilling, surely they will need to share this with the market... But there's no updates on their website as of today. They will also need to find the money to pay MAFL the earn in fees, not just the drilling costs. Hopefully they get their ducks in a row.
Ascendant’s MC is about £5m now (from I believe c.£30m when they agreed the earn in). Their only play is now LS and, to do the drilling, they need to access financing (I think it’s about $2.5m for the 2020 planned drills. It’s worth noting they currently own 25% of LS, for this increase to increase to 50% they will also need to pay $2.5m as per below.
24 months after the closing date: US$0.5 million
36 months after the closing date: US$1.0 million
48 months after the closing date: US$1.0 million
I believe they may struggle with financing as they don’t have any cashflow whatsoever. They are also not a small company staffing-wise and I expect salaries to be on the higher side. Hopefully the two best outcomes as I see it are:
a) Ascendant manage to get financing and, with LS being their only play, really push this forward as fast as possible with all the required funding for both drilling and our earn-in payments
b) They can’t agree financing so either can’t continue (but will only own 25%, so we would have 75% to agree a new partner and with Ascendant having spent £££ on the LS project) or they do a huge placing in relating to their MC which won’t really affect us anyway (apart from the 3% share we own) and we go back to point a.
I have great respect for Jacques; hopefully we will all do rather well in the long term.
I am still worried about Ascendant's financials, their MC is now about £5m, which isn't much more than ours. I have emailed them to try and source a little more detail of their financial strategy and updates. If I receive anything, I will of course post here.
It would also be interesting to have an update from MAFL on whether Redcorp has made any progress repurchasing the 15% of the interest in LS owned by EDM (oh and for Jaime to buy some shares!!)
Anscendent have updated their website to reflect Lagoa as their play and have also put a very good presentation on which details a lot more around Lagoa Salgado; it’s a good read.
One thing I would desperately like to see is Jamie Lesser to buy some more shares. He only has just over 200k’s worth. Many of us have considerably more. In a recent interview he was asked what the shares the management had, and he said that with he and Jacques hold around 20% - which is pretty much all Jacques actually, not him!
Thanks Nelly, . it's worth noting that Ascendent will only get £1m from the sale of the El Mochito mine in hard cash and their Market Cap is also now only £5.3m ($9.3m CAD)... I'm not sure what the new 8km drill plan will cost, but a previous drill plan was RNS'd at c.$5m I believe (will need to check past RNSs here). They will also need to fund the feasibility study and the outstanding $4.5m USD cost to bring their share of RedCorp up to 80%. In their previous press releases Ascendant pointed out that they are "currently talking to financial partners and is hopeful that the drill program can be funded by alternative non-dilutive measures for its shareholders".
That all being said, this is now Ascendant's only play, so let's see how they approach it. I'm not in the slightest worried as, if Ascendant couldn't afford to continue then with the work so far completed we'd be in a far stronger position to agree a new (maybe better) deal with another player than we were in 2018. This is all conjecture though, and I'd prefer Ascendant to push this through to development as, it being their only play, time if of the essence for them - which can only be positive for us.
Morning all.
Does anyone know what's going on with CAP. Their website hasn't been updated since Q2 2019 and as they're private they don't need to release anything). The available information is always the same, that they have two plots which have had seismic (ages ago now!) and both will be drilled. But they never seem to actually drill or set a date... Any ideas welcome?
Please don't get me wrong, I think CAP shareholding we have may turn out brilliantly well, it would just be great to get some NEW news. I can only presume they are trying to farm out in the background so they don't have to cover the drill costs themselves? But that's a complete guess...
Market Cap here is a joke. I read the RNS and invested yesterday, I've seen a good rise and I expect it to continue into this afternoon and next week. But this board is full of people now playing their own agendas (why on earth would you feel the need to come and tell us you've sold..., per chance hoping to make people actually sell?), so I'm going to stop reading today and check in next week :)
It's gone very quiet here.... Hopefully news soon. Both Trinidad and Morocco could be game changers, we only need one of these... We have Ireland too, although the former two look like the current news drivers. Happy to hold and wait, as I'm sure many of you are.
Agree, a good interview. Thanks for sharing the link. I've no idea where this will end up, but he's clearly vey excited. If we go to production then that free carry could be worth a considerable sum. It's also worth remembering we have 1.3% of Cap Energy, this will be material if they hit anything with their exploration well in Senegal (hopefully they will drill this this year...).
As I say, no idea where this will end up. But even 50p would only me a mcap of £17m.
Take away for me is the new drilling project could be up to 12,000m. It's worth nothing the recent results were based on drilling 7,000m (with 20 holes), so this would be a big step up (with c.30 holes). Jacques also mentions that Ascendant would be hoping to double the resource (40mt!). Hopefully we don't have to wait too long for confirmation.