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I wonder what the handshake on 21st October was?

Ruffles knows :-)

By 21st November

The only reason that the whole of the exclusivity period has been used is because of the extended closure of the Cadastre. Nobody expected it to be closed this long. Most of the due diligence will have been completed already, it’s just a case of what remains to be done now the Cadastre is open. If it requires another short extension then so be it, it’s hardly the end of the world. What’s important to me is being invested in the most highly prospective tenements in the Copperbelt, I genuinely believe we have the potential for more than one world class deposit and I think in the long run it will be well worth the wait.

We’re not going to get any announcement until the license status has been sorted out. That may well be happening in the background who knows? At the very least Nick should be able to give some update on where we stand. For me, having waited so long already for this to happen, a bit longer is not going to make any difference.

The Minister of Mines was due to release a statement about new funding for Mopani (and also KCM) very shortly. They were looking for US$300m in order to extend the mine. I was wondering if this might have a bearing on any potential deal.

These are the Mopani assets as listed in the competent persons report of 2011:

Processing assets:
a sulphide copper-cobalt concentrator at Nkana (“Nkana concentrator”);
an oxide copper agitation leach-solvent extraction plant at Nkana (“Nkana Leach' Plant”);
a cobalt plant which incorporates a copper solvent extraction and an Electro-Winning (“EW”) tank house (“Cobalt Plant”);
a sulphide copper concentrator at Mufulira (“Mufulira concentrator”);
an oxide copper agitation leach-solvent extraction plant at Mufulira (“Mufulira Leach Plant”)

I wonder if both of these potential transactions are with Mopani.

https://jubileemetalsgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/October-Presentation.pdf

There is a PDF on the website now, which makes it a bit easier to look at the details from last weeks presentation by Leon.

One thing I didn’t pick up on before is that they are looking at acquiring a separate disused Cobalt refinery as well as a Copper refining facility:

“Jubilee is advancing discussions to gain access to existing copper refining footprint in partnership with current owners

Jubilee is advancing discussion to acquire cobalt refining footprint for the Northern Strategy”

The share price is where it is based on last years results which were significantly worse than predicted due to the upgrades at Inyoni. Falling metals prices and increasing costs have also combined to negatively affect the share price. No amount of talking will change that. What counts now is the next set of numbers which will hopefully show that the £58 million investment is starting to deliver results.

Clearly there have been unexpected problems this year with power (S. Africa) and water (Zambia) which will have some impact on half year results, I thought Leon was very up front in acknowledging these issues and explaining how they plan to deal with them. Still we should see a significant improvement in the numbers compared to the previous period.

If you look at the slide showing numbers comparisons the price per copper tonne last year was US$5,382 (from memory), when most of the copper produced was due to testing. Leon stated the current cost per tonne as US$4,500. I don’t know how much lower it might go, but the new acid processes he announced could drive it well below US$4,000 at Sable. Once production starts at scale in the north costs should drop even further and I believe as part of the MOU Mopani would be supplying us with acid on site which should drop costs even further.

As for the chairman, he has made absolutely no mention of expanding into South America or Australia, he has mentioned DRC as a possible next step within the next few years. Leon was very clear in the presentation that they intend to fully exploit the potential in Zambia before looking elsewhere. I think that the Zambian government is already well aware of the potential that Jubilee offers to contribute to the stated target of producing 3 million tonnes of copper per year within 10 years but also to create significant long term employment.

Sadly Peggy has already proven himself to be a bit of a spineless investor, selling his holding at the VERY BOTTOM of the market. Now he wants to give advice to those with more backbone… funny eh? :-)

Thanks Yas, it's not that much effort really :-) Anyway I will be delighted to keep Travelcard / Noresco / whatever he's calling himself today, up to date. They seem so sad all the time, I'd like to cheer them up!

As the precedent was set yesterday I thought I'd take a look at how things might look post completion of Northern Zambia and Eastern Limb S. Africa expansions. Obviously this is a bit tongue in cheek as there are plenty of unknowns but making a few assumptions this is how earnings might look:
https://tinyurl.com/2p8ektxr

These are the numbers that the chart was based on:
https://tinyurl.com/2w34bue4

I'm assuming:
current average metals prices
PGM expansion into Eastern Limb is the same scale as Western Limb currently.
We achieve the target of 40,000 tonnes / year of Copper in the North
Cobalt production of 1200 tonnes / year of Cobalt at Sable and 2400 tonnes / year in the North
Cobalt production costs US$1,000 / tonne (total guess)

As I know Mikey will ask... if you use a Copper price of US$10,000 / tonne the earnings are around US$500 million!

Cadastre still being updated, looks like invalid applications being removed, probably non-registered companies. Hopefully the license renewals being dealt with in the background. Eyes very much on the prize :-)

Worst case the changes are irrelevant to us, best case they are positive. I’m not saying any more until we know for sure as I might be putting 2 and 2 together and making 5!

No changes directly to our current licenses but the keen eyed will have spotted some changes which might be relevant to us when everything shakes out. I’m not going to say anything about that here though, I don’t want to give the usual suspects here any prior warning :-)

Those small black circles mark the open pits at Sentinel, Lumwana and Kansanshi. It was just to show that the large mines lay on an arc (no pun intended) which passes through the middle of our licenses, between Cheyeza and Muswema. In reality I should probably have drawn a band to include the wider areas being mined, including the soon to be mined Enterprise, which is even closer to us than Sentinel.

I think you are being a little over optimistic with the numbers there, production costs are US$4,500 / tonne of copper. Also in the north we are in JV’s with some of the material which will reduce attributable earnings as well. There’s no doubt the numbers are big… just not as big as you suggest. There’s every possibility that the price of copper will be much higher by the time we get producing in the North too.

I’ve no idea… I filtered him ages ago!

Summit is another one for the filter, there’s only so many times you can read the same post! I presume he’s on a wind up as he knows very well that dividends aren’t coming until after the next phase of building.

Those people clearly don’t know what they are talking about because copper was a minor contributor to our earnings last year and the basket price is primarily driven by rhodium not platinum. The drop in earnings was due to Inyoni expansion and retreat from recent highs in PGM’s particularly rhodium, Leon said as much in the presentation.

https://www.mining.com/web/chinas-billion-dollar-cash-for-copper-trade-grinds-to-a-halt/