RE: John Cornford - MI, new article28 Sep 2020 12:56
First unsnagging of these will be of BHP’s freedom to add to its 13.6% shareholding after October 15th, but a second, related one, will have to wait for an extraordinary general meeting of SOLG shareholders which another, 7.6%, shareholder, Toronto listed Cornerstone Capital Resources (TSX:CGP), is threatening to call.
CGP wants to try to replace Solgold’s Board, whom they accuse of diminishing Alpala’s value (of which CGP has a 15% direct share and – along with its SOLG holding – has an effective 21.4%) through the streaming deal with Franco Nevada that Solgold recently completed.
This has given SOLG $100m with which to progress Alpala to a Definitive Feasibility Study, which is necessary to raise the full $2.7bn Alpala build cost (4 times more than SOLG’s current market value).
But its price, which CGP (and Newcrest) complain of, is the handing over to FNV for all time, of 1% of Alpala’s revenue. The true cost of that to Alpala’s shareholders, assuming profits at 50% of revenue, will actually be nearly 2.5% of its NPV.
Meanwhile, SOLG is working to head off criticism on a number of fronts, and has struck back by re-stating its all-share bid for the whole of Cornerstone (current market cap almost one quarter that of Solgold) which, if accepted before the October 14th deadline, would solve a lot of the Byzantine set of inter-related issues now ensnaring Solgold. Except that Cornerstone has roundly rejected the bid, and no one seems to believe it can succeed. That the deadline is the same as when BHP is free to add to its stake in SOLG is another factor for observers to ponder.
Solgold’s second response is the promise to publish soon an update to the Preliminary Economic Analysis for Alpala which produced the $4.5bn NPV that everyone has been working to. Solgold is hinting that it will show a much better result, although that might stem from assuming higher gold and copper prices than before, and using a lower discount rate.
But unless that update shows more metal in the ground (unlikely to be significant) and a much cheaper build cost, a re-stated NPV won’t impress either BHP, Newcrest, or Cornerstone, who will be going by their own assumptions and estimates of the solid underlying reality of Alpala, namely its detailed production profile year by year and the true costs at every stage. This shows that practically all of Alpala’s ‘value’ (at current gold and copper prices) is actually generated in the first 15 years of its life, making it more valuable than would appear from the NPV alone.
Solgold’s third response has been to start drilling (after Covid-related delays) at two of its other most promising targets in Ecuador, with the obvious hope that early results will convince all those milling around it that it is even more valuable than its Alpala stake alone, and so influence whatever strategy potential bidders might be considering.
cont..........