Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
In case you haven't noticed we are at the start of a big market correction. Everything will fall including gold. Gold will recover first and will rise sharply especially now the crypto bubble has burst. Hold on to your golden tickets, forget about these shares and come back in a few months once the dust has settled!
Cheap takeover more likely. From the sound of what Biosynex were saying at their AGM it is the IP they are after, currently valued by the market at £0. But the ongoing DHSC dispute will put bidders off. It can't be jusy Biosynex interested.
No, in a crash everything goes down including gold. Gold will be the first to recover and will rise strongly. A lot of young people will be wiped out by the crypto crash as most owners are under 40. Worse still a lot of purchases are on margin £1 buys £100 crypto so debts will exceed deposits. Novacyt is already bombed out with no debt and a lot of cash, can it fall any further?!! In a crash.
Warintza is a near surface surface deposit and is therefore suitable for open pit which makes it very cheap and easy to mine. It is also a very large high grade deposit and still growing. Aside from Solgold, if you want exposure to copper, Solaris is a good buy and it seems Ecuador is the place to be.
Going into a recession with levels of debt at least double what they were in 2007 and savings at a record low. Debts so high that if interest rates go much higher those debts can never be repaid. Inflation going into double digits and there is nothing that kills businesses faster than inflation.
Pound weakening against the dollar which in itself will send inflation soaring as all commodities are priced in dollars. War in Ukraine causing geopolitical uncertainty and food shortages. Threat of covid mutating still hovering in the background. A very nasty outlook indeed.
In the 1970's when inflation went into double digits gold was the best performing asset. In fact gold went from $35 dollars an ounce to $850 dollars an ounce, a 25 times increase in value. During the 1970's interest rates also averaged about 10%, but gold was still in demand.
In recent years the UK government has done NOTHING to help or promote British industry. No notion of long term investment and planning at all. No protection for strategic industries - Arm. Inmarsat, ultra Electronics etc. Quite happy to sell off strategic assets and know how. They have certainly done their best to screw over our fledgling domestic diagnostic industry with the way Novacyt and Abingdon have been treated. But on the other hand quite happy to pay their mates extortionate prices for importing cheap stuff from China.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/29/south-africa-fifth-covid-wave-infections-omicron
Add in a caveat that we are assuming covid is over and testing is in terminal decline. Last year the company found revenues were in decline early on but then demand rose subsequently. I don't think anyone can say for certain there won't be another wave nor that there won't be a more troublesome variant.
I don't think that goes far enough. Before proceedings were issued this was a private matter between DHSC and Novacyt save that they had to make shareholders aware that there was a dispute. Once either party issues Court proceedings though the dispute becomes public. Investor relations need b*******, their RNS should have set out the nature of the claim, the remedy and dames being sought and details of any defence and counterclaim. This will all become public at some point and the Directors risk, quite deservedly so in my opinion, ending up looking like a bunch of muppets. Note my strong language, I think it is deserved.
They can't keep quiet forever. Court documents are public documents and as anyone can write to the Court requesting them the lack of detail is pointless. The Directors will just end up looking like idiots when one of the papers picks it up and runs an article about the dispute. I think the argument that DHSC may owe Novacyt more than we realise for breach of contract may have some merit. Usually these things settle out of Court so they are either very confident of their position or they think there is a tactical advantage to issuing first and letting Novacyt counterclaim.
They are trebling the drilling rigs and going deeper. That's always a good sign and aside from the involvement of majors (who are only interested in tier 1 prospects), bodes well. Solgold had one drill rig for ages, then more and more until they had over 15 on the go.
As long as it translates into increased sales it is good. At the moment I think there are two big issues holding Novacyt back. The first and I think the biggest is the DHSC dispute. The second is diversifying the business at speed. I don't think covid testing is done with yet but the outlook for that is hard to predict. New variants are still popping up and vaccine efficacy wanes over time. It will be interesting to see how they are performing sales wise.
If you notice they are divesting out of fossil fuels but their copper and nickel production is down. They need to buy copper and renewable assets or they are screwed. They should have been investing in copper and renewables five years ago.
Tier 1 copper projects are as rare as hens teeth. There is enough copper there for a mine to run for decades, maybe even a century. I say there will be a bidding war, simply because the big boys want to be in copper and there are few assets to buy.
Ecuador is proving to be as richly endowed as Chile. In time it will become one of the world's largest copper producers. I expect a bidding war for Solgold between the majors as much as for what remains to be discovered as to what has been found to date. Solaris Resources is also one to watch, a huge high grade copper discovery at surface, amenable to a mega pit for bulk mining and again, it's in Ecuador.
The DHSC dispute will be settled by mid year. It is tied in with the outcome of the judicial review as the legality of government contracts is being challenged on the basis of EU competitive tendering rules. The whole point of said litigation is that if the rules were breached the contracts are void and unenforceable. That would, quite conveniently for the DHSC, enable them to say we owe you nothing. If the contracts are held valid I reckon DHSC will have to pay in full. If the contracts are void I reckon all that can be claimed will be wasted materials and goods delivered.