The latest Investing Matters Podcast episode with London Stock Exchange Group's Chris Mayo has just been released. Listen here.
Great update this morning. Bulk sampling already, not hanging around are they!
Nice! That looks very promising!
Echo, Pecten, I agree with both of you. For the first time in ages (maybe ever!) I actually hope they are taking their time with the continued drilling programme and can 'delay' any positive news release for as long as Fatty Cornish will allow them.
Just remember:
- more Marsfontein/Thorny drill results still to come and huge World-Class potential
- no debt
- hardly any overhead
- drilling programme paid for
- plenty of other programmes to look forward to
- reliable experienced sector-world-class management
- Market cap £3m.
Madness?!
Echo - agree on all counts re BOD. Mr Winnifrith is probably a jolly nice chap (never met him so I don’t know!) but ultimately he is a journalist who sells subscriptions by telling stories (sometimes) in an entertaining manner, but an analyst he’s not, and certainly not someone from whom I’d counsel anyone to take ‘investment advice’!
I agree. There is huge potential from all sorts of sources; sunland/kalahari, maibwe, free states and of course Zimbabwe, all quite besides Marsfontein. In any case, any suggestion of a second drill there could be explosive.
Great photos on Twitter from BOD of the drill samples - I think what they're trying to quietly demonstrate is the coarseness, abundance and colour of the olivines, which is a very good indicator for the level of diamond abundance: the more abundant and coarser the better. And they look pretty coarse and abundant to me!
Just doing a bit of digging (so to speak) and found this on Subterrane's Linkedin page (looks like from Jan but hadn't seen it before):
"Subterrane Ltd has found potentially several Marsfontein size diamond deposits to be drill-tested in January. If we break the drilling equipment this will be ironically good news with its partner Botswana Diamonds Plc . It is believed, conservatively US$ 1 billion diamond deposits to be farmed from the acreage....2020 is the year of progress. Subterrane Ltd earns 5% on the diamonds resource production project... in the #ThornyRiver project."
Confident stuff. And no wonder they are confident enough to be being paid in shares....
Pecten, TBTT, I'm out and about atm so can't type into my phone properly or quickly enough - BUT Mars M1 pulled out c.2m cts from 1m tonnes, $247m in 2 years, 3 day payback on investment, from a mine the size of my front lawn. At least 4 stones 100ct+ and I think one stone of 400ct+ which got broken in process. It's generally been thought for a long time that there was much more to be found in the area, and here it is by the looks of things. Perhaps Cast can add some knowledge here in my absence he knows it well too?
M1 pipe! - everyone remember what M1 did and those grades, I hope...?
Hear Hear Pecten agree on all counts. Fantastic news with plenty more to come by the looks of things.
Thanks to James and the Subterrane boys for all the hard work - and in all that mud lol.
More tweets today - still drilling - interesting drilling angle...
And Rio Tinto might be interest what with Argyll closing this year.
Echo I agree - there is an historical precedent here too - as African Diamonds these same guys found AK6 in Botswana, sold it on to Lucara and carried on exploring the remaining prospects as the Botswana Diamonds you see today. The same could easily happen should any of these drills prove good. However now you have a different and much more developed/explored 'asset base' (Klipspringer, Sunland etc, plus anything they find in Zimbabwe, and maybe Maibwe) which could look very attractive in its entirity to a larger third party. DeBeers springs to mind and given the strong personal relationships there it's the most obvious, but there are others of course.
They now have a strong enough investor base already to carry it through whatever investment may (or may not) be needed to develop the assets, they don't really need the herd - or, as Echo says, if/when it's successful then international third parties who are known to be looking for assets to mine will be all over it.
As for 'one man and his dog' well if he's a $247m man and his very rich dog that's fine by me too. Anyway, I rather like the way they're keeping us up to date with the adventure.
Echo I did say 'for fun'! I wouldn't want to be accused of wanton ramping lol. 5p would do nicely. For starters anyway!
Echo there’s a whisper going round that M8 may be bigger than M1. Personally I’d rather wait and see what they find before speculating (and risking attracting the attention of the Twitter Spivs!). But, just for fun and between ourselves, let’s take $247m as a baseline and set aside for now that there’d be some additional investment needed, per share that’s around 28p.
Just to add to previous post, someone on another bulletin board just posted a quote from James Campbell in a Mining Review interview in December 2019, which I think was/is pretty prescient:
https://www.miningreview.com/diamonds-gems/botswana-diamonds-old-deposits-new-technology/
It has long been held that there should be high-grade kimberlite pipes other than the Marsfontein mine in the Thorny River area and Campbell believes that there is potential at Thorny River to discover another Marsfontein-type mine.
Pioneering geophysical work, undertaken by UK-based structural geophysics expert Subterrane, using its proprietary technology, has already identified what is believed to be five kimberlite pipes buried at shallow depth within the Thorny River area – the targets of which are very similar to the pipe that constituted the Marsfontein mine.
“Unlike at Marsfontein, where the kimberlite was visible at surface in the form of a blow with a width of about 20 m at surface, the blows within the Thorny River area only span about 1 m in width at surface owing to the geology which is comprised of a dolerite dyke swarm, compounded by the 1 m to 3 m of cover,” explains Campbell.
The geological conditions within the Thorny River area has meant that conventional geophysical techniques have been unable to detect kimberlites under the dolerite including those that are deeper seated. “This new technology may however be instrumental in leading to the discovery of kimberlites similar to those at Marsfontein,” says Campbell.
Nice RNS.
Given James C's excitement in recent interviews, and chatting to Subterrane guys at the AGM with their pioneering (for diamond exploration that is) methods of survey, I reckon the next few days could prove very interesting indeed especially re M8.
Quote from the RNS: "The Thorny River targets were selected after detailed field work by UK based Subterrane Ltd, a leading firm in new techniques integrating geophysical data and structural geology with data collected from extensive field mapping and Botswana Diamonds' geophysical database. These drill ready targets include buried or obscured kimberlite pipes. The analogue is the iconic Marsfontein diamond mine which was partially obscured by a dolerite dyke.
M8 drilling will establish potential as a high grade "blow". Botswana Diamonds believes that M8 has unexplored potential."
A new Marsfontein M1 perhaps? (and perhaps even bigger?). That was nearly 2m carats (and high grades too) from c. 1m rock in 2 years, and 4 day investment payback, remember.
While I agree that it's always positive to see directors supporting placings, the directors here collectively already own around 15% of the company which is pretty decent by AIMco standards. Personally I don't think that whether they did or they didn't participate this time distracts from this Company's attraction as an investment - and they can hardly be accused of treating it as a 'lifestyle business' unlike many others.
Also re Joint broker just have a look at the new house’s other clients - there’s a lot of ‘John Teeling/162 Group’ in there!) to see that their appointment has a lot more to do with relationship broking than broking placement shares.