Member Info for TigerByTheTail

Tharisa Mine concludes 4-year wage agreement

Shareholders are advised that a market related four-year Collective Agreement on Substantive Terms and Conditions of Employment has been concluded with the main unions represented at the Tharisa Mine, namely the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and Solidarity.
The agreement is effective from 1 July 2020 until 30 June 2024, and applies to employees who are subject to the bargaining units at the Tharisa Mine.
Wage negotiations were mutually postponed earlier in the year during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequently concluded.
The agreement underpins the ongoing stability of Tharisa's labour relations and allows the Tharisa Mine to focus on growing the business for the benefit of all stakeholders.

- My thoughts... Considering how strikes have affected Samancor in the past, for instance, this really good news.

Hi Ashikshetty!
Just google "metal bulletin" and "chrome prices" and you should get a summary of recent MB articles. It's enough to get the most recent headline price of 42% chrome concentrate. If you subscribe to MB, you can get the full picture of the market, but I don't need that level of detail.
Overall, I think booming PGM prices more than make up for chrome prices being in the doldrums. And (as we've discussed on here before) I wonder if there isn't a negative feedback loop between chrome prices and rhodium prices. (I.e. higher chrome prices lead to lower rhodium prices, and vice versa.)
Given the PGM basket price, THS must be absolutely coining it this quarter...

Hi JimJam!
But practical experience does show that consolidations reduce share prices.
God knows why. In the abstract, a consolidation should be a simple "neutral" mathematical operation. But, in reality, it seems to trigger a downward adjustment in a company's market cap.
That said, finance is a far more important question right now.

PGM and chrome prices continue to go their own separate ways.
Rhodium at a new high of $16,350 (JMAT prices), and overall PGM basket must be near or at a record high.
But, chrome is falling again. This from Metal Bulletin (Dec 9):
"UG2 chrome ore prices dip again; ferro-chrome markets hold still
The UG2 chrome ore market fell over the week ending December 8, which sparked a rise in liquidity as buyers sought to acquire material.
Fastmarkets’ chrome ore South Africa UG2 concentrates index, basis 42%, cif China fell for the fifth consecutive week to $129 per tonne on Tuesday, down by $2 per tonne or 1.5% from $131 per tonne the preceding week. The index has declined by $10 per tonne or 7% since November 3.
“Demand has been incredibly strong but it’s price sensitive,” a producer said. “It seems this is the bottom of the market because we’ve seen buying interest and prices rise since the start of the week.”

Hi Mr. Tibbles!
I've also been thinking that the vaccine may trigger a crash for some time now.
Bad news has been treated by the market as good news for some time now - mainly because each time bad news comes along that gives the central banks an excuse to print more money.
So the good news of the vaccine may make people think that the money printing will be coming to an end. And once the selling starts I think it will feed on itself as investors are so over-leveraged, and there are almost no shorts left to act as a brake.
I don't have a timetable for this - I wish I did. But for sure stocks are overpriced and in a bubble. And sooner or later the reality that we are in a deep recession and that millions of people have lost their jobs will have to be recognised.

Let's end this discussion on EUA on the JLP board here.
FWIW, I remain 100% confident in what I have said about EUA. And I could say much more.
But it's your money - and you're free to lose it how you like.

I admit I wish I were in on the funding deal. Flip the 2p shares into the market for a quick profit PLUS the upside of cheap options if the drill hits commercial oil. What's not to like?

I found this little tidbit about Thorny River hopeful...
"Recent drilling has discovered a 0.4 hectare blow, the so called River Anomaly. We do not yet know the diamond grade but the average on this dyke is 55cpht. We have sufficient data to construct 3D models of the blow. Core drilling will take place in early 2021."

Very clear messaging - answered all my questions!
But still NSC II licence to go...

Hi Mikie!
Take care out there. I just glanced at the EUA board - more complete twaddle from the rampers, this time about rhodium.
Know, 80% of the world's rhodium comes from South Africa, mostly from the UG2 reef of the Bushveld Igneous Complex. Norilsk Nickel do produce a small amount of rhodium as a by-product of their operations, but it is essentially geological nonsense to suppose that there is a rhodium rich resource in the Kola Peninsula.
You do need to ask yourself why an audience of mostly ignorant PIs is being fed this misinformation, and who benefits from it.
There, take it or leave it. But that's my good deed to a stranger done for the day.

I'm sorry, Mikie, I wasn't clear in my post.
I think - on a good day - JLP might get $50m to $100m for their 64% share of Tjate. Maybe nearer $50m. That would be a truly great result for JLP, who could invest the unexpected windfall in new rapid turnaround high return metal tailings projects.
These undeveloped PGM assets are simply not worth the money that you and other EUA investors seem to think they are. Look at Tharisa, they have a mega asset in Karo, which the market doesn't value at all.
The current PGM boom has an expiry date, which is essentially the date when diesel and gasoline engined vehicles start to be replaced by electric ones, turning what is now a very tight market for PGMs into a looser one. Separately, the economics of rhodium (simply irreplaceable in cats) are stronger than the economics of palladium, as cheaper platinum can be used in palladium's place, with certain limitations (sintering). This substitution is apparently already occurring.
In short, there is a not a huge amount of economic sense in buying an undeveloped PGM resource and spending a huge amount of Capex on it to turn it into a mine by, say, 2025; as by then PGM prices may well have fallen back. (There should be an asterisk here, as widespread adoption of green hydrogen technology would change that. But, note, hydrogen technology mostly uses platinum-iridium-ruthenium catalysts, rather than palladium-rhodium ones.)
I don't know what game Blackrock are playing, but it is probably not the one you think it is. I'm still confident that EUA is wildly overvalued. There is no way on earth that a small Russian palladium dominant resource plus a larger "exploration target" in the Russian far north is worth the kind of money EUA investors think it is.
If only it were so! It would imply JLP, SLP, and THS were ten or twenty times undervalued by the market. All are excellent companies, with good prospects, and IMO will increase in value. But, no, they won't ten bag in a day!

Hi Zag!
I have found over many years that when a government (or a large multinational) WANT to lose a court case, they usually manage to lose it.
That's regardless of the actual rights and wrongs of the case.

Like it or not, the Bahamas PM's comments that he is against drilling DO matter.
The eco-warriors have filed an application for a judicial review of the government's decision to let the drilling go ahead. It is the government who have to defend their decision to grant permission to drill, not BPC, who (legally) are only an interested bystander.
Minnis has given a clear public signal that he is against the drilling. That's as much as a nod and a wink to the government's lawyers to not bother making a vigorous defence, and even to maybe "help" the eco-warriors own legal team with a few selected leaks of information. That's how things are in the real world.
Therefore, I think the odds of a judicial review (and most likely an injunction with it) being granted have increased substantially.

Hi Mikie!
You should know that EUA valuation is a company paid for valuation and, frankly, garbage. The true asset value is about $50 to $100m - if anybody wants to buy MT, that is. (The metallurgy is very difficult, and there are huge problems with working on the permafrost, and with obtaining decent staff up on the Kola Peninsula). Do you imagine if MT was so valuable that Norilsk Nickel would let a load of foreigners make a fortune? Are you that naive? It's Russia, for God's sake. I worked there for 20 years, in exactly this field, so I do know what I'm talking about.
Tjate value is useful for JLP - perhaps in the same range as EUA, IMO. But the mcap here is vastly lower and JLP has lots of other assets. Imagine what JLP could do with a "free" injection of capital of that size!
For comedy value, I point out that for the current mcap of EUA you could buy all of JLP, plus all of Sylvania Platinum, plus all of Tharisa, plus a decent 200K oz gold miner like PAF, and still have a few hundred million pounds left over. That's about 300,000 per year of current PGM production (including a very high proportion of rhodium, since all 3 companies are exploiting the UG2 reef of the BIC, plus copper + cobalt, plus chrome, plus 200K ounces of gold).
As I said, AIM sometimes get valuations spectacularly, hopelessly, completely wrong. Why? and who benefits? are interesting questions.

Hi MikieSunday!
Don't take the mcap of EUA as a serious estimate of the value of their resource - it's just one of those weird AIM bubbles that happen from time to time. The objective value of EUA's assets is only a fraction of EUA's mcap - perhaps a tenth. EUA's shareholders will discover this in due course, and most of them will lose most of their money - there's no way to avoid that outcome now.
That said, the 64% of Tjate that JLP owns does have real long term value, none of which (IMO) is included in the JLP share price. I'd also mention that THS have a very big development asset in Karo, and even SLP have a smaller but high grade open pit Northern limb deposit called Volspruit - and the value of those assets isn't included in those companies' share price as well.
All in all, AIM can be a very strange market indeed!

Hi Tharos!
Thanks for the reply. I admit that my Spanish isn't that wonderful, but I'm reading the news article to refer to exactly the missing NSCII permit.
Anyway, an RNS from the company must be coming either later today or on Monday morning. I'm sure things that will clear things up.

Hi Auson!
It was a secondary placing at 200p to institutions - there are no placing shares to clear. There might be some placing shares flipped for a 5% profit at 2010p, I suppose, but we are well below that level.
IMHO, HOC seems to be a bit bipolar at the moment; the share price races up and down manically trying to find a level, but not succeeding.

Hi All!
Coming back here after a long time away.
This is the key final authorisation that BKY require, is it not? Or am I missing something?

A 150K sell from yesterday has just shown up. Judging by the way the market-makers have been upping the bid today, I think that might mean that the seller is finally out. If that's right, then I'd certainly expect to see 100p by the end of the year. Probably by the end of next week.
FWIW, THS seems to me to be as good as share as any in which to shelter from the effects of a no deal Brexit - i.e. sterling down, UK facing companies (esp. banks) down.

Rhodium still creeping upwards in price - $16,300 today (JMAT prices) - a new high.