peer comparisons, from presentation, page-300

Hkp, I understand your points, however I note that management have purposely designed the plant in a way that can be relatively easily added to to increase production, and I remember having this discussion with management nearly 12 months ago. This is also supported by the following section of the last investor presentation released to market:

EPANKO
Ability to sell into current market.
Not reliant on future demand to commence production
Ability to increase production on new demand

I agree that the additional production will increase opex, but in aggregate only. It won't necessarily increase opex per tonne, which means the margin is the same, and highly likely to be better as economies of scale should see the opex price per tonne decrease even though the total opex has gone up due to processing more ore. The issue of potentially decreasing the plant life I agree with, but my overall point I would make is this:

The scoping study notes $40m capital cost for 20,000 tpa production profile, or $2,000 for each tonne of annual production.  To suddenly upgrade the production profile to say 40,000 tpa doesn't mean it's going to be an automatic doubling of our capex costs. Economies of scale mean that each additional 1,000 tpa of production that we add, should start costing us less and less than $2,000 per tonne of annnual production. Which is why the cashflow numbers are going to start looking increasingly better with every additional tonne of annual production that we add, because every additional tonne should cost us slightly less than the previous tonne. And this we will know once we've had the JORC category upgraded, and an updated scoping study released, all of which is due in the near term.