I spent last night adding all the more recent assay results to my model of MRE. For what it's worth the 26/4/24 assays didn't add much to my calculated MRE but the ones from 3/6/24 did, especially to the very East of project and the very West, as expected from the locations. Also added confidence to the width of mineralisation..
I get a high grade section of around 20-25Mt of 2.5% inside an overall MRE of 180mt of 1.1% Nb2O5..
As I've previously stated I left out a lot of the lower grade 0.2-0.4% areas that were deeper. Assuming they are in the overall MRE it will add 50m tonnes but lower the overall grade and probably only add a few hundred thousand tonnes at best to overall Niobium content of ~2M tonnes.
Remembering that niobium is worth around 4 times copper, now imagine we had found a copper deposit of 25Mt of 2.5% grade at shallow open cut depth, inside a residual deposit of 180Mt of 1.1% Cu.
I could imagine with exactly the same resource and assay results, but instead of the Nb2O5 it was copper, we would already have an Mcap of more than double what we currently have. It would be an easy $2-$3B, even at this early stage.
Going back to 2010 when Sandfire were upping their MRE on 6th September 2010, they had around 760,000 tonnes of copper equivalent (I converted the gold to copper Eqv), worth around $A6.2B at the time. Their Mcap was $A763M, or more than 10% of the inground value of minerals.
If our Mcap was the SAME quantity of Copper instead of Niobium we would be valued at around that same 10% mark of inground value that Sandfire were, which would be ~$A2.2B assuming the total resource is around 2M tonnes of Nb2O5.
Instead we have a commodity worth 4 times as much as copper. Also translating our Niobium grades to copper grades, it would be like having 20-25Mt of 10.2% copper , inside a total resource of 180Mt at 4.5% Cu.
That valuation of Sandfire above was after an upgrade to their MRE but before the DFS.
By early 2012 with development and first DSO mining underway, they had an Mcap of $1.2B with an estimated LOM revenue of $A4.2B and cashflow of $A2.4B (from March 2012 Market update announcement 8/3/12)...
For us to be equivalent, assuming around 2Mt of niobium, by that stage our Mcap should be around $25B at the same stage in a couple of years time.
We are woefully undervalued because people just don't understand Niobium. BTW I just couldn't help myself and bought another 500 shares and consider myself lucky to get them at $17!!
If I can work out the above type of numbers from ASX announcements and my own research, so can the BEOT, which is why the concerted effort to part retail from their shares. Another 46K shorts added yesterday. I expect the game to continue for a while, which is why I only bought 500, I'll add more if they make it cheaper.
All IMHO of course..
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