zfx.mt burgess.drake.oh and aim.

Zinifex alliance in the pink with zinc
PURE SPECULATION
Robin Bromby
September 16, 2006
WHILE the lemmings were throwing themselves off the commodities cliff this week, the folks at Zinifex, after a cup of tea and a lie down, were taking a calmer view of the outlook.
Rather than being depressed by the International Monetary Fund and Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach calling the end of the metals boom, Zinifex signed an alliance with Drake Resources under which the junior will comb the world for new zinc deposits. Drake managing director Bob Beeson was in the zinc business with North and the old Billiton, while the company's geologist Chris Blain was the leader of the exploration team that discovered the huge Cannington silver-zinc-lead deposit.

Undeterred by Roach, Mt Burgess Mining is going as fast at it can to get its large zinc-lead-silver deposit in Botswana up and running. That company's chairman, Nigel Forrester, has been watching zinc stocks on the London Metal Exchange falling by anything up to 1500 tonnes a day even during the northern hemisphere vacation month of August. The LME held 780,000 tonnes of zinc in April 2004 but only 160,000 tonnes this week. Forrester believes stocks will be at critical levels by 2008, a conclusion drawn from looking at Chinese needs through to 2010 for projects already in progress or on the drawing boards.

And Kagara Zinc this week predicted its before-tax profit for 2007 would be up 215 per cent on the 2006 result. And AIM Resources said yesterday it had closed offtake agreements for its emerging zinc mine in Burkina Faso.

One point to remember: zinc until just a few years ago looked like a metal with no future. This meant that very little exploration was done for almost 10 years. No one has been able to suggest how the industry can fill the expected shortfall of 2.4 million tonnes expected in 2010.

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