Please explain what dilution you are talking about. Float in Nov 2010 with 70m on issue, presently sitting (if I'm not mistaken) at 88m. Unlike many small caps, TMZ HAS NOT diluted itself.
Please see in this mornings Australian (comments on TMZ near the bottom):
China’s gold reserves underestimated
China has been gradually boosting its gold reserves but won’t admit how much it has. Source: AFP
Pull the other one, Beijing. Various analysts put it more politely, but there was a wave of scepticism washing over Friday’s announcement that the people’s Bank of China had increased its official gold holdings, adding 604 tonnes since 2009, making the present total 1658 tonnes.
Being more measured than Pure Speculation, Bernard Dahdah, precious metals analyst at French bank Natixis put this view thus: “It begs the question of what’s been happening to the gold produced that hasn’t been taken by the central bank”. One London broker said he did not believe the Chinese announcement, and wondered why Beijing was playing down its gold purchases. Another said: “The timing (of the announcement) is as expected; it’s just the amount that makes no sense”.
After all, many quite sober analysts had figured the Chinese central bank was holding somewhere between 3000 and 4000 tonnes; earlier this year Bloomberg, analysing trade data and mining production, put the country’s official holdings at a quite precise 3510 tonnes.
Another London brokerage qualified its analysis with “we are assuming the Chinese data is accurate”.
Sorry, Pure Speculation is not prepared to make such an assumption. We’re with Dahdah: where has all that gold gone? In 2013, for example, China mined 437 tonnes and imported 1033 tonnes. And that pattern of increasing mine output and a steady import flow has been repeated over six years. In the first three months of this year, Chinese mines lifted output by 14 per cent and refined 110.7 tonnes.
In 2014, the Swiss sent 600 tonnes to China. In 2013, one month — July — saw 106.4 tonnes move from Hong Kong into China. Last November’s Hong Kong supplies totalled 99.1 tonnes. This has gone on month after month.
Sure, a good deal has gone into jewellery and bars and coins bought by private investors. And the World Gold Council estimates China’s domestic banks have, since 2009, collectively added 600 tonnes of gold to their inventories.
The most popular theory is the Beijing’s announcement was finely calibrated. In October, the Chinese are hoping the International Monetary Fund will add the yuan to the currencies employed in the fund’s special drawing rights currency basket, so further legitimising Chinese money as an international trading currency. The theory is that China needed to show it had been buying gold as a backing for that currency.
But, if Beijing revealed its real reserves and came out with a figure closer to 3000 tonnes, that would frighten the horses with regard to the US dollar — in other words, the hair-trigger types would assume China was desperate to convert its US currency holdings to something safer. China may at some stage want to deliver a blow to the greenback, but not while it still holds some $US3 trillion of them.
This year we have seen Beijing relax import rules, so that Chinese companies mining gold abroad can sell their output directly into the home market (meanwhile, the ban on exporting gold from China remains) while a $US16 billion ($21.7bn) gold fund — backed by physical gold — is being established in Shanghai.
As the World Gold Council has noted: “In China gold is synonymous with money.”
The unexpectedly low reserves figure also had the effect of accelerating the bearish trend on gold, the metal losing 1 per cent to $US1132 an ounce. Only 1.8 per cent of China’s official reserves are in gold; the European Central Bank has 25 per cent of its reserves in the form of yellow metal.
It doesn’t add up.
China keeps tin down
We noticed that the tin price got a good bump at the end of the week. It rose $US430 a tonne on Thursday and another $US595 on Friday, to close the week at $US15,645 a tonne.
Still not enough for Kasbah Resources (KAS) which stated last month it would not try to raise development finance for its Achhmach project in Morocco until tin settled above $US18,000/tonne or else the terms would simply be too harsh. It has not helped that, as of Wednesday (before the late-week surge), tin had lost 25 per cent in US dollar terms since the start of the year, and is the worst-performing base metal in 2015.
The problem has been Myanmar and its ability to ship large quantities of tin concentrate across the border into China at what is presumed to be a very cheap price. China has been sourcing 98 per cent of its tin imports from its neighbour. This has cut other suppliers out of that market and discouraged new mines going ahead.
The two-day surge might have had something to do with rumours sweeping the industry that there will be a move to have tin from Myanmar’s Kokang province declared “conflict metal” on the basis that the area is the scene of fighting between Burmese government forces and separatist rebels. If we monitor what comes out of the conflict zone affecting the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Rwanda, the industry argument is, the same should apply to Myanmar.
Capital Economics have downgraded their year-end forecast for tin from $US20,500/tonne to $US17,500. Not good enough for Kasbah, but that could change if the conflict story gains traction. Whether that would matter to the Chinese is another matter.
Still, at some stage (probably when Myanmar mines out all the easily extracted tin in the north) the world will face a severe tin shortage. Therefore, it is probably an idea to keep working toward becoming a tin producer, as Thomson Resources (TMZ) is doing in central NSW, the junior reporting some high grade intercepts it says indicate the presence of a wide tin zone.
Minor metals dented
Expect a severe liquidation within China of various specialty metals and rare earths, says London broker Whitman Howard. This follows the fact that Fanya Metals Exchange in Yunnan province has been unable since April to return any money to investors, with punters owed the equivalent of $8.7bn due to the falling prices for indium, cobalt, tungsten, silver, vanadium, tellurium, rhodium and the rare-earth oxides dysprosium and terbium.
Protests by angry investors erupted last week. Any sell-off of metal stocks now held as collateral is likely to send their prices plunging even further.
Iron ore, coking coal, nickel — and now minor metals. It never rains but it pours.
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