Member Info for moneyhawk

Not seen him on here for a while, he did say he'd sold out of everything, maybe just lost his interest for a while. But yes, hope he's ok.

Think the time scales are probably realistic sumo. But the valuation they put on Kabwe was surprising. Worth just $27m to the Mcap, compared to $96m Shard valued it at last year. The big differences seem to be that WHI aren't including Vanadium for now, and the direction has shifted to use Sable for copper production which is going to impact on zinc. But they value the Sable copper project at $142m, so overall it looks like a better use of the plant, and not a bad return on our investment there.

Thanks Groucho, good spot and very informative.

A lot to take in there, but gives some answers to a few of our questions. Q3 2021 given as the time scale for Zinc, Q1 20222 for lead. Vanadium is marked as price dependant. So I guess if the V price hasn't risen much by then, we'll just be storing that material for later processing to capitalise on any future price increases.

In the meantime, copper very much sounds like the priority at Sable, and likely that the refinery capacity will be kept for copper production once we start processing Kabwe zinc tailings. So I take from that the plan will be to produce zinc concentrate only in the short-medium term.

10.38 re "Get your facts right"

Couldn't agree more. The licence was revoked in Dec 2017, before both dates mentioned. Borelli just so happened to find the letter telling him just after we signed the deal. Having to go and get the licence back for BMR was not an ideal start, but all worked out well in the end. We got full control of Kabwe and then bought Sable as well. Net result can be seen in Grouchos posts below.

What a load of nonsense. There was no licence in place when the JV was signed, as per BMRs announcement whilst the ink was drying. That was the root of the problem which ultimately led to BMR having to hand over Kabwe.

As for the sable, yes we’ve bought a refinery from Glencore with existing plant. Not exactly a bad move.

Has someone really forgotten there’s a global pandemic, shutdowns and a resulting drop in pgm prices? Not sure how someone could expect much more than we’ve done in the circumstances. Thread title seems rather apt to me.

Its difficult to know just what is going on with Kabwe and the tailings there, but what we do know is that the costs that have been paid out have mainly been taking over BMRs tailings project, which was next to nothing, and then buying sable next door which was the main expense. This has all led us to having a working copper refinery which we can now use to generate earnings from much larger copper projects than the kabwe zinc/lead/vanadium tailings.

Looking at current commodity prices, it does make sense to now target copper and process the zinc/lead/V later when prices improve. But unsure if there are other reasons as well for why we haven't processed any of the kabwe tailings yet. We have been processing the copper tailings at sable, so there doesn't seem to be a regulatory barrier preventing us from processing tailings through the plant.

billyb, the 35% operating margin is based on processing our own tailings. Worked out yesterday that equates to a cost per tonne of copper produced of roughly $3700 a tonne.

The new deal will mean we're buying copper concentrate from the JV, so we'll have extra cost there. But its not quite as straightforward as assuming our cost will increase and we'll have a lower margin because we'll be buying the material. First, we have a majority profit share on the copper concentrate sold by the JV, so we'll also make some profit on what we buy to process at sable. Second, the copper concentrate we buy should reduce our cost of $3,700 we currently have at sable, as it'll remove the need to concentrate the material at sable and thereby reduce the current cost. But then we'll also have transportation costs to factor in.

So cost for the new concentrator plant around $25m, quite a sizable amount, but then it is a large scale project. Also an indication that he's looking at other similar deals for copper, but no mention of progressing the kabwe tailings.

8.58 - No details of HRZ core samples have been announced yet. It could be that all further reporting of results is on hold until the XCD takeover is complete, but my gut feeling is that the Charlie1 results are going to be much the same as we found at Icewine2. DW is not really known for holding back good news, and the silence on the HRZ core samples is deafening. But the location wasn't chosen for testing the HRZ, and as we now know the location was chosen by PMO to test what they wanted, not what we wanted.

Sumo, I think that's the issue, my understanding is that its not possible to have both zinc and copper production running at the same time as both need to be using some of the same parts of the plant.

Likewise I'm not sure how long it'd take to switch over from copper to zinc, I don't think we've ever been given that detail. But I doubt it'd be an overnight job.

Think that may depend on zinc (and vanadium) prices improving or not being able to source more copper beyond what we have in tailings. Copper prices have rebounded back to the level they were around Nov/Dec last year, zinc prices still have some way to go and are way down from when we first took control of Kabwe.

No point in us stopping copper production to spend money on finishing the zinc circuit if we won't earn more from it.

LCs goal is to increase revenue year on year, it doesn't look like he'll be able to do that by producing zinc instead of copper at the moment. Unless the set up is going to be changed so we can produce both at the same time, but previous indications have been its one or the other using parts of the same circuit.

Think its going to take the next round of quarterly results for reality to really sink in TC, so that'll be July onwards, especially if companies start to issue revised forward guidance. Just don't see this supposed V shaped recovery happening.

Fortunately we can manage to turn a profit on current commodity prices and lower. May be that our earnings targets are going to take longer to be achieved than we were hoping, but could work in our favour in the long run as other producers cut unprofitable production.

I’d be surprised if TW is gullible enough to believe an AIM company with low cash, no revenue and lots of costs coming up wouldn’t need to do a placing. It’s how it works, we’ve been through it here, we wouldn’t have the revenue and growth we’ve now got without the previous placings.

TT, i understand from some posts on here and the GLR board that CB said the licence had already been applied for at an investors presentation towards the end of last year. However the official news via RNS's has never said this, and has only ever referred to an application due to be made. Would suggest that until there's an RNS that confirms an application has been made, we should assume that no progress has been made on that front.

I'd expect CB to try and time Star Zinc development with Kabwe being ready to process their ore, so an application going in would be very good news for us that Kabwe is getting ready to process both star zinc ore and our tailings.

TopCatz, it is looking like Star Zinc is going to be more costly to get into production than CB has been letting on. Unsure what the hold up is with making an application, perhaps they just haven't had the funds to get the necessary reports and assessments together. Now with their recent rise in Mcap they've been able to raise a lot more than they could have done a few weeks ago, so hopefully they can get on with it.

Although rather immaterial at the moment, until we've finished the zinc circuit at Kabwe they've got no where to send the ore. But as we know work on that is on hold, and we're just using the plant to produce copper/cobalt.

Placing at GLR today for £900k

"The Company intends to use the proceeds of the Placing for general working capital towards exploration on its newly acquired copper-nickel-platinum group metals licences in the Kalahari Copper Belt of Botswana (the Kalahari Licences) and progressing its Star Zinc and Ka****u projects (the Projects) in Zambia, including, for the former, an application and related environmental activities for a small-scale mining permit."

Think this is now the 3rd placing for funds to pay for a licence application at Star Zinc and I'm still none the wiser as to when they're actually going to make the application.

Perhaps this is the key benefit to us with the XCD takeover. It gives us more to bargain with on a farmout, and still have a lot left over to progress ourselves when circumstances improve. e.g. We could now do a deal on Icewine giving away a lot more than PMO settled for, and then still have the XCD acres.

When we had news of the PMO farmout, I'm sure I recall DW saying a bigger operator would have wanted a bigger % and including the HRZ, so the deal we got was in our interests. With a whole other patch of land and new prospects, maybe it gives DW more scope to go back to other parties that were in the dataroom.

Looks to me the only way we're going to drill again is through a farmout, we won't be funding it through a placing. Seems to be the only thing certain at the moment, our Mcap isn't high enough to raise enough to fund drilling. Unless we're talking about 100%+ dilution, which is highly unlikely.

If our Mcap was to increase significantly from here, then maybe we could do it, but I don't really expect that to happen without the prospect of a funded drill, so a bit of a catch 22.

The trouble with our H1 results is that they came out just after the markets crashed in March, all our operations in south africa had been shut as part of the lock down there, and commodity prices were falling off a cliff.

The results themselves were very good, the circumstances at the time of their release were dire.