Investor persistence is a key to Yale’s momentum in Mexico
By John Hurst
Just a year ago, Yale Resources Ltd. (TSX.V-YLL) decided to concentrate its efforts on developing properties in mineral rich Mexico. As its position in the mining-friendly country expands steadily, its investors are being urged to stay the course as its market value gathers momentum.
Currently Yale has three properties in Mexico: an option to earn 75% in the Urique Project, an option to earn 80% in the Zacatecas Venture, and the wholly owned Carol Property.
The Zacatecas Venture is actually made up of four properties and each has old workings dating from the Spanish colonial period. All are within eight km of the Veta Grande processing plant, for which partner Impact Silver Inc. recently announced that it has an option to acquire. The companies are awaiting assay results from the recently completed drilling program and therein lies the rub.
All along, the Vancouver-based Yale Resources has relied on one of its great strengths, excellent fieldwork. Even so, president Ian Foreman, P.Geo., said his company, with many others, has to wait longer than usual for assay results.
“It’s very difficult to have investors truly understand how slow this can be and how success takes a long time,” Foreman said. “We all talk about ‘overnight successes’ and they are all companies who have been around for two or three years or who have gone public after finding something. So the exploration process never takes as short a time as investors would like.
“I think one of the key things - and it’s getting better known around the industry these days – is that the assay lab is a classic bottleneck, being that there are only a couple of recognized labs that are doing the work for all of the public companies out there. There’s typically a six to eight-week lag time once samples are sent into the lab. It’s just the question of capacity.”
Foreman wants his investor’s money to go into the ground. There is only one way to know what is in the ground and that is to get assays. So, whether it be trench sampling, soil sampling, bio-geochemical sampling, or drilling, all of these assays have to go through the assay lab. There were times last year in which the labs were caught completely off guard by this and there were lags of three and a half months waiting for assays.
“In the meantime, what is the investor to do? They buy on the potential of the company and its portfolio of properties and sadly, a lot of the investors don’t have long-term investment strategies. They buy on the premise that a company is going to find the next Eldorado with their next drill hole. A lot of the investors are not prepared to wait the appropriate length of time to let a story mature,” Foreman stated.
His advice: observe the people, projects and financing.
“If you are investing in the people in a company - good people will succeed in this industry. It might take three months; it might take three years. But they will ultimately succeed.”
Foreman said that one of the key reasons that Yale will be successful is its management team and a board of directors that can be put on a par with companies much larger. Fore example, one Yale director is Richard Hughes, a celebrated mine producer of longstanding performance and president of Golden Chalice Resources, now sitting on a drill hole that raised its share price from 28 cents to $2.08 this spring.
The Spanish-speaking Foreman is an experienced geoscientist in his own right, with many years of experience in Mexico and in Latin America. In addition, company founder Ron Shenton, vice-president for corporate development, has a financial background with over 20 years at public companies. Yale recently added a Mexican lawyer to the management team, with an MBA and over 10 years’ experience, to serve as manager of oper¬ations for Mexico.
Also new with Yale is Jesus Herrera Ortega, general manager of Yale's wholly owned Mexican subsidiary -- Minera Alta Vista S.A. de C.V. Mr. Herrera is a mining technician with a business management degree. He has been involved in the Mexican national program of cartography, coordinating the geological mapping in Mexico since 1999.
With this team in place, Foreman feels that it is only a matter of time. In the meantime, Yale will ponder the value of processing dump material through the Veta Grande plant once Impact Silver exercises its option to acquire it. Sampling from these dumps has returned values that average 200-300 grams per tonne of silver.
