Ann: Expanded 2023 Growth Drilling Programme, page-3

Here's my take on the announcement I'd like to see, in plain English.

ANTIPA MINERALS GETS BACK TO BASICS

Antipa Minerals has decided to walk away from our plan to build a mine and treatment plant. Instead, we're going back to what we set out to do in the beginning – discover new resources. After all, we are a small exploration company. We can then sell the land or licence the mining rights to a big company that is better placed to finance such a massive enterprise.

Shareholders will see an immediate reduction in risk and capital expenditure, as well as the removal of the need to raise $300 million through a combination of debt and the issue of new shares. All of this means a bigger, faster return on their investment. Shareholders will cease having to wait for the unknown but obviously long time that it will take to start producing and selling our resources, many of which haven't even been discovered yet, let alone identified, demarcated and drilled.

In the same way that the job of a talent scout is to discover talent, not produce films, we have decided to focus on what we do best. We also understand that the time, expenses and risk involved in building a mine and treatment plant are simply too much to ask our shareholders to bear. The decision was made after we calculated the impact that such a huge amount of debt and new shares would have on our share price. We realised that it just wasn't fair to shareholders.

The downside is that Antipa Minerals won't be in the running to make the really big money that comes from production. But we think shareholders would prefer the sense of certainty, stability and good market results that our decision will bring, even if it comes at the expense of what may – or may not – be supercharged returns at some point in the distant future. In the end, we think it's better to make a smaller but still very healthy profit, than an ongoing situation of destruction of shareholder wealth.