West African gold miner Endeavour Mining aka EDV continues to prove they are top notch mine builders with the announcement of the first gold pour at their Lafigué mine in Côte d’Ivoire, completed on budget and ahead of schedule. EDV has now built five mines in the last ten years, each built in two years of less, all on budget and on or ahead of schedule. That's about as good as it gets.
Lafigué is expected to be a very low cost producer, scheduled to produce over 200k oz Au per year for at least 13 years at an AISC of around $900/oz, generating large amounts of FCF for the company.
With this latest round of builds now producing, I expect a rerating of the company's shares as the implications sink in. The brouhaha involving the former CEO is now in the rear view mirror.
Arras Minerals aka ARK announced the start of an IP survey on their Elemes property in Kazakhstan. This is designed to further refine drill targets on a number of potential Cu/Au porphyries on the property, defined by historical drilling by other companies and further exploration by ARK.
Once the IP results have been collated, drilling will resume.Note that this is not one of the properties falling under the ARK-Teck exploration alliance.
Queen's Road Capital aka QRC, which operates by placing convertible debentures with mining companies and pays the resulting income out as dividends, announced a big move into copper. Their latest debenture placement, worth $50M, is with a private company running a copper mine in Zambia, and will be used by that company to help fund a major expansion in their production. On QRC's side, this will increase their copper exposure from under 5% to ~20%, and will increase their convertible debenture portfolio to US$209 million, generating an average 9.6% coupon with an annual interest income of US$20.0 million which will support future dividend payments to shareholders.
QRC is essentially a vehicle for a group of Australian billionaires to generate income, and we retail shareholders can go along for the ride. I expect the billionaires will be happy with this move.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
