RE: SP15 Mar 2023 22:54
“ We know January and February is a write off in Zambia and South Africa”
We know operations were affected into January in Zambia with continuing power issues. In the 17th Feb video Leon was still forecasting 22,000-23,000 ounces of PGM’s for this period so I don’t see how you can write off January and February in South Africa. Anyway rather than making wild assumptions lets just wait for the actual numbers on Monday.
If Roan had been producing solidly since ramp up at maximum output of 800 tonnes / month (grade dependent) that would still only have been 1,500-1,600 tonnes to the end of October. It’s likely they were having water issues during that time which would have affected production. It seems a bit unlikely that after all the testing that was done before ramping up that they have somehow got it wrong. Also remember that power issues were affecting Sable, not just Roan:
“ During the period under review, and to mitigate the risk of equipment damage and loss of product quality caused by outages, management has taken the decision to curtail copper production at Sable and instead increase stockholding of partially processed material at its Roan concentrator, which is targeted to be refined at Sable following the implementation of the new power management plan.”
The upgrade to the Roan front end is expected to take up to 8 weeks according to Leon, hopefully the stockpile will go at least part way to covering that. After all we can’t produce cobalt without processing copper as well… the cobalt is a by product of the copper process.