starting to look good, page-32

re: no green bottles hanging on Tastarga, if you are who you suggest and have the money and contacts you do, I've long wondered why you bother even reading about this company, never mind contribute to posts. I am a relative nobody (more on that later).

You wrote "Sources from Japan? Simce when are they significant in the tantalum market."

I respond that Japan is / was the world's second biggest economy and it was demand for mobile phones, electronic toys, PC's etc that they mainly supplied in 2000 that helped the tantalum price rocket. I'd bet most Australian's are also unaware that Australia has long enjoyed a trade surplus with Japan. Few punters realised they were the main customer for Australia's timber exports a few years ago when I was going on about GTP.

I quote from http://www.ttiinc.com/marketeye/zogbi_on_passives_jan_02.asp
The Tantalum Supply Chain: 2000-2001
January 14, 2002 by Dennis Zogbi

"Third-tier tantalum capacitor manufacturers are almost exclusively Japanese, mainly Hitachi AIC, Matsushita Electric Industrial (Circuit Capacitor Division), Nichicon Tantalum Corporation, and Matsuo Electric. Most of these companies maintain their tantalum production assets in Japan, but Matsushita produces the majority of its tantalum capacitors in China, and is considered by the Chinese government to be the largest tantalum
capacitor producer in China."

Gippsland also said in January "Gippsland has another offtake agreement with a major Asian tantalum customer
for 100,000lbs per annum." GIP is aiming to be the second biggest supplier of tantalum, but they will still be providing a great deal less than what SGW had been providing until they started losing contract(s), so the current oversupply that Cabot speak of (the position varies for other companies, but is improving some are even a little short of it), will work its way through with few problems over time the way things are shaping up - contracts are long term at the moment.

I am a nobody in this industry, but have done a lot of research and taken a punt, in much the same way as I did with GTP several years ago, in the face of a barrage of emotional and uninformed opposition near the lows. As with GTP, I'm am doing my best to provide information and support. As with GTP, I have promised not to be supportive when I have verifiable information to indicate the stock is not a potentially very good opportunity (for what it's worth, I started placing negative posts on GTP on other forums last year, to provide balance to the new found, over enthusiasm).

I am sorry that the information about the Egyptian business etc environment is of no interest to you. One solution is to stop reading it and / or put posters who contribute on "ignore". It is provided in part to counter the mischievous and ill informed comments about Egypt and its neighbours from various sources, some of which has been an outcome of the Iraq news and debates - also to let potentially interested punters know that there are some good things happening in that part of the world which are normally hard to find out. Such an environment is important if a company is to do well with reasonable safely in more than the short term. In such an environment, which includes the world's best performing stock market, despite all the camel and sand jokes, there is more chance of potential upside mania and funding. It's no accident that dot coms did best when the U.S. economy was strongest and venture capital was greatest for example and I'm not overly interested in being invested in an area of the world where skirmishes could see everything lost overnight so to speak (AVM is a sad, partly related example). It was possible (more so before than now) that funding would have come from Arab related quarters and the price of oil and performance of stock markets is just as relevant to Arab and European interests now as the high DOW and low oil price was to U.S. and Australian interests in 2000. The Arab region now has several of the world's richest countries, which they weren't in 2000. This helps fuel demand and interest in the region.

You write "Market cap $16m trying to borrow $105m" ... snowflakes chance. I don't see the logic in this over time. The equations were far worse in 2003 for almost all miners and rather than go with the original plans, GIP has roughly doubled its output contracts and plant requirements. There have been some dramatic changes in market caps. in the last two years I don't see how a high market cap. now for FMG makes Twiggy any more trustworthy than when he was hiding in Europe a few years ago (how is SIB going?). I know that investment banks think they look better lending to companies with high market caps, share prices of at least $1 (or $10 in the U.S. - recapitalisation is a simple answer supposedly)., but I am not alone in preferring to look almost exclusively at what the company appears to have to offer.

You write "and more particularly the substantial shareholder notice of one of the Loan Arranger's mates selling as best he could" ... I respond, I've been wondering where the verifiable evidence is for this. The interest was marked as a GIP employee superannuation fund holding over two years ago.

The lack of buying and promotion in GIP has been one of the things which has been complained about for years - some of the complaints have been fair and I've made a couple along the way, although was happy overall. Much of the good stuff which has come out over the years has been met with general scepticism and disinterest (eg. the diesel price), in part because of the country in which GIP are trying to set up. I had done some checking last year and the year before with various qualified sources outside these forums as to why there was so little interest in GIP's potential claims and the consistent answer has been "Egypt". Old understandings and attitudes die hard, despite the verifiable evidence of once in a generation changes the Government made last year working so well.

I may be misreading what punters care about or who is reading this stuff, but indulge me for a moment re. a financial arena contact in London (met two decades ago while working there - kept in touch since). When the changes of last year were pointed out, his response was disbelief as something like this had been tried a few decades ago in Egypt and hadn't worked. When I asked what he knew about feldspar and tantalum, "nothing" was the basic response. He then checked with the chief telecoms analyst in a major fund manager in London, whose main area of interest was mobile phones. When that gent was asked about what he knew about tantalum, the answer was also "nothing". To be honest, I found this a little scary and learned a few things I'd rather not know about how superannuation etc is invested.

GIP has found things hard enough that they even had to cancel a small issue in 2003 during a small cap. resources boom and that's when I started to smell another opportunity. Going through trades and news for the last five years, I felt that this stock is not marked by tell tale accumulation before major news like many other such stocks. I don't have the resources to analyse London meaningfully, however (does anyone?). Up until last year, I had a good feel for things, but these days, I have very little idea when the next announcement will come, so you won't find me, for example, accumulating immediately before if and when something happens. Anyway, what I do doesn't count in the long run. What the likes of RAB do does and they are still in.

I have no verifiable evidence that GIP will make it or otherwise and am still waiting for an announcement relating to what happened last February (after the Minesite presentation) and afterwards. I have been trying to provide balance to the tirade of sarcastic, informationless, unverifiable put downs that this stock has attracted in spades since shortly after I first posted in 2003 (Sabretooth being a classic example with hundreds of posts, on not just this forum, in 2004) - at least those promoting SGW's power to shut others out have gone quiet and TAA has toned down again. To your credit, you have provided some high quality, general information at times. Wish more posters on this forum could and would, but I still don't get why you are even here, given you "lost patience" with the company at the time of the BFS publication and there are far bigger fish to fry.

GIP is certainly no PDN (thank goodness), but most of the criticism in recent times that has been applied to GIP could have been applied to PDN in spades in years gone by. Until verifiable evidence is provided to the contrary, I believe GIP has a lot of potential and is worth my interest.