Member Info for rcgl2

Yes addicknt I know what you mean. Some people think the PFS is going to put rocket fuel under the SP and it will be 55p by Friday. What seems more likely is that the PFS is very good but not in a way that is easily digestible by short term traders and algos. The NPV may be lower and some bot-produced articles might appear saying that Solg has disappointed with a lower than expected NPV. When in fact as others have already said the important things will be the capex, IRR and overall deliverability. So wouldn't be surprised if the SP rises a bit tomorrow morning and ends up finishing down on the day tbh.

If Solg gets taken over tomorrow and you are left with a few hundred K in cash, what exactly are you going to invest it in Assuming you don't spend it on booze, birds and fast cars, or just squander it.

Given that we are all here in Solg I would assume that many of us are of the view that money printing and debt levels are too high, inflation is now all but baked in, and the place to invest for the next few years is real assets, commodities and the companies that extract them. I might further assume that many would be on the look out for some promising junior copper plays and gold miners, perhaps in up and coming mining jurisdictions such as Ecuador, hoping to get a leveraged return on the likely boom in industrial and precious metal prices.

In fact it would it be going too far to say that many here would be looking for an opportunity very similar to... Solgold?

If GS is right and copper goes up 3x, 4x, 7x or whatever, isn't every small copper miner and anything with copper in its name going to go bananas regardless? Which is why it seems strange to me for people to want to "get Solg sold asap" for anything less than £1 now.

Maybe I'm missing something but to me there's a key point being omitted from Mike Henry's stance that we keep seeing repeated in article after article. He keeps making the point that BHP is not going to go out and just rely on M&A in order to increase their copper resources, but will prioritise exploration and early stage entry into projects. Which is fine, and what they have done by taking and maintaining a 13% stake in Solgold. But at some point, there has to be a transition of the project/resources to BHP itself. They could just let Solg develop Alpala but BHP isn't in it just to own 13.6% of 85% of Alpala while it's developed by someone else. I assume they want all (or most) of Alpala for themselves.

They may not go flying into mega M&A deals, but from the perspective of Solg it feels like some sort of corporate event has to occur, whether it be takeover, asset sale, JV, whatever.

On the one hand, it's of course a good endorsement to have Norges IM on the register. However, I would caution against assuming they have a specific focus on Solg in particular... they currently hold positions in 9,338 companies in their equity portfolio. They pretty much own a chunk of any large and mid cap company you can think of in most developed and a lot of EM markets.

One thing that's interesting on their website is that you can see how they voted at shareholder meetings, including at the last Solg AGM. They voted against the remuneration report and against Moller, unsurprisingly.

https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/responsible-investment/our-voting-records/meeting/?m=1583883

One thing to bear in mind, Wyloo actually started the bidding for Noront when they already held 24% of the company. When the competing bids started racking up Wyloo held over 37% of Noront.

So yes Wyloo did fend off BHP, but they were already the largest shareholder in the target.

I get the impression Darryl won't want to use wildly ambitious numbers in the PFS. He's not a typical bigmouth prospector/explorer who has spent his career talking up every rock sample and drill core. Since he spent most of his career at BHP I assume he knows exactly what will be seen as credible by majors and potential funders.

zoros/addicknt/SM - agreed and between you I think you just answered the question as to why BHP hasn't bid for the whole of Solg yet as everyone expected them to... because they simply don't want the whole of Solg. What they want is Alpala. I assume if Porv or Rio turn out to be economic mines they may want those too one day. But what I don't think they want is a large exploration portfolio across one frontier jurisdiction, which is what they'd be getting if they bought Solg outright.

They have said that exploration is one strand of their strategy to source future facing metals. But they are not an explorer, so why take on a shed load more licences in Ecuador that all need work and spend in order to maintain them. Solg's portfolio is already too big for Solg itself to concentrate on hence they are trying to JV a few of the low priority targets. Given that Solg is almost entirely valued on Alpala at the moment, why would BHP want to take on the rest of the portfolio for free only to have to spend a load of time and money divesting themselves of it. Being a global mega miner, they want a portfolio of global mega mines of which Alpala can be one. They don't want a whole load of little greenfield sites up mountains in Ecuador and hundreds of local employees to have to manage, imho.

As addicknt said, taking a stake in Solg has given them a foot in the door. Most people seem to think the assets are BHP's for the taking. They are happy to spend what to them is fairly small change to buy the optionality of virtually having first refusal on the key assets as they get derisked. And they are happy for Solg to undertake that derisking under BHP's watchful eye. Even if Porv and Rio turn out to be decent mines, are BHP really going to want more than 3 working mines in Ecuador in say 10 years time? That's quite concentrated country risk for Latam, especially in light of what's going on in Chile. I think they are happy to flag down each cab as it comes off the rank but I don't think they want all the hassle of owning their own taxi firm.

"I hope you've learned your lesson cleverthoughts as you're released from suspension tomorrow, that spamming this board and pog with negativity will be silently reported and next time you might be banned." That was you on the POLY board the other day Ray.

So basically if someone posts any negative comments on a share you're invested in such as GGP or POLY, you go running to teacher to get them banned for "spamming the board with negativity".

But if it's a share you're not holding such as SOLG, your constant negative comments are providing "balanced views"...

For someone who keeps bleating about not being bullied or silenced off the boards you seem to spend an awful lot of time telling tales on everyone else and trying to get them banned.

And I know you've got some cosy relationship with the site admins, I can see how fast posts are getting removed here... they even deleted some on Sunday, despite the fact they never bothered to do anything until Monday morning when this board was getting spammed to oblivion over the weekends last year. Can't even fight your own keyboard warrior battles...

Fine so how do you justify the fact that you got Miagi banned from LSE for daring to post the balanced view on the GGP board that it was overvalued at 35p and likely to come crashing down?

IIRC everyone there was so busy having a giant circle jerk that anyone who said it was over valued was hounded off for being a disruptor or a de-ramper. When in fact they were spot on seeing as it's now trading in the 13s.

We don't need a board sheriff here thanks, especially one who doesn't practice what he preaches.

Go ahead and report me anyway, since you seem to need to report everyone. I don't care.

What actually happened with Fauro then? I must admit I've never really paid any attention to Solg's non-Ecuador licences at all.

Looks like a knee-jerk sell off in line with gold, which has sold off on hopes of a peace deal in Ukraine. I think.

They really should change the company name to something with copper it.

I had just assumed (without having given it much thought or gone back over the timeline of posts, tweets and drill results in detail) that they drilled some cores which looked visually spectacular and they had very high hopes for the assay results, and in fact they turned out to not be as good as the visuals suggested. IIRC Jason Ward tweeted a picture of some cores with a comment along the lines of "here we go again" implying they looked like they could be as good as the headline Alpala holes... But I just assumed that when they were assayed they didn't live up to expectations.

I might be completely misremembering, but I didn't think it was intentionally misleading, more just loose talk that didn't turn out to be accurate.

I see thanks add! Makes sense.

Addicknt, a question I'm still not clear on: what is the likelihood of a bidder for the whole of Solg (BHP or BHP+NCM) being satisfied with not getting 100% of the company? A bidder needs 90% to squeeze out the minority. We know NM effectively controls almost 20%. How likely do you think it is that BHP or whoever will be happy with just obtaining majority control regardless of whether through an agreed or hostile bid? Is a going to be conditional on 90% takeup or will there be a lower threshold.

For me this whole debate about approved vs hostile bids is a bit of a red herring. It all boils down to will enough shareholders accept the bid to get it over whatever threshold the bidder wants to achieve. Will this be 90% or not?

Out of interest does anyone hear from Fawzi these days? At times last year it seemed like there was almost constant dialogue between some posters here and the company. For the last couple of months I've hardly seen anyone mention anything. Has he stopped responding? Have you guys stopped asking? Did he ask you to not post replies on here?

CD not sure if you were replying to me or Copperpot but yes agreed, that's what I meant. 4 years ago may have been early when BHP bought in. Now with PFS a few months away and DFS not far behind I think it's the time to buy the asset and get mining.

Yes I read that as carrying out exploration (either under their own name or via investments in companies like Solg) to turn up new discoveries, or making early stage investments the likes of which they already made in Solg 3 or 4 years ago, isn't going to move the needle. Now they need to acquire some producing, or perhaps de-risked shovel-ready, assets.

For the takeover enthusiasts... https://www.ft.com/content/5cf59e4c-c79d-4cba-9ed4-cd549b3c5e1f

Christopher LaFemina, analyst at Jefferies, said exploration and early-stage investments would not move the needle for a company the size of BHP and therefore it needed to “go big” with M&A and move soon.

“We believe that the longer it waits, the higher the price it will need to pay. The potential targets have likely been identified by the company. The talk of M&A is not just idle chatter.”

Looking at the MD&A it reminded me how surprised I am that Jason Ward came within a whisker of getting booted from the board, 56 to 44 or thereabouts.

I know large shareholders were not thrilled with management and I expected Moller to go, but I always thought it was generally accepted that Solg were doing all of their exploration right at least and that was JW's area.

Twigger was re-elected comfortably by comparison so his public swipe at BHP was obviously fine with everyone else.