Fromt he article below:
"Universal's Roseby project – much larger but low-grade – just might be a significant goer, however, if CopperCo can get its hands on it and copper prices hold up in the medium term. And Chinese interest just might be there, with Universal chairman Peter Ingram reportedly having had some contact with the People's Republic. "
My comment:
CUO offer is undervalued. However CUO may well go up. So the smart move would be to buy URL which has downside limited by CUO's offer, but with upside from any potential increase in CUOs price. Every 0.1c increase in CUO price adds 0.6c to the value of its URL offer.
Cdchi1
Article from today's Australian:
China picks over ore bodies
By Tony Grant-Taylor
January 03, 2005
IN the past 12 months, a number of local mining consultants have been briefed by Chinese interests to survey the Queensland scene, for both companies and exploration areas with copper prospects – with a view to joint ventures or even outright purchase.
The potentially available pickings have been slim.
But on the back of surging Chinese economic growth, copper, the "red metal" which made Mount Isa – though Queensland's premier base metal mining community was first established to exploit silver, lead and zinc – is as fashionable as it's been in a decade.
Copper, conductive of heat and electricity, malleable and ductile, is a major component of electronic and white goods and is used in construction and power generation and distribution – the stuff of both China's huge domestic development push and its equally massive export drive.
So also back in fashion is the Mount Isa Inlier – the geological structure that hosts the city's own huge ore bodies and scores of other base metal discoveries, from the Century, Hilton and George Fisher lead/zinc deposits to other copper lodes like Ernest Henry and Osborne.
The latest indicator of the region's popularity came just before Christmas when CopperCo – the red metal vehicle put together when Keith Liddell's Mineral Securities sponsored the merger of Avon Resources with the copper holdings of the resource plaything of a bunch of wealthy Melbourne wheelers and dealers Buka Minerals – bid for Perth-based Universal Resources.
Buka was controlled by such "names" as Andrew Kroger and Tom Klinger – who at the then McIntosh Securities was Christopher Skase's major 1980s equity raiser – until December 2003.
Then one of Australia's modern gold mining heroes, Robert Champion de Crespigny, along with wealthy investment partners, property tycoon Ron Walker and merchant banker Mark Carnegie, were invited to the party.
The CopperCo deal saw Buka's Inlier copper interests, in and surrounding the Lady Annie deposit northwest of Mount Isa, combined with Avon's exploration areas in the region – as part of de Crespigny's Buka strategy of building a new diversified mining house, like Liddell's, which at least initially will hold minority stakes in a string of miner/explorers.
Lady Annie, with the nearby Lady Loretta lead/zinc deposit, has been known since the 1960s, however. And while there are plans afoot to try to develop a 15,000-tonne-a-year operation at Lady Annie, it is hardly a company maker.
Universal's Roseby project – much larger but low-grade – just might be a significant goer, however, if CopperCo can get its hands on it and copper prices hold up in the medium term. And Chinese interest just might be there, with Universal chairman Peter Ingram reportedly having had some contact with the People's Republic.
The attraction of exploration acreage in the Mount Isa region is the belief that the area, Australia's only region to have yielded so many major base metal deposits, still has significant wealth to reveal.
The table, from a 1998 paper on the Inlier by Don Berkman, outlines the major finds to date in the area – and highlights the fact that it has produced four deposits containing over $20 billion worth of metal and another seven containing over $1 billion worth.
Despite this, and the fact that the province has been well geologically mapped, the Inlier, except where minerals have "outcropped" on the surface, has not been easy to explore – with even modern exploration methods finding it hard to fathom some of the area's tortured geophysics.
In recent times, Century, Osborne and Cannington have been found. But the argument is that as explorers get more sophisticated, there are more rich secrets to unlock. Geologists, of course –– like all treasure hunters – must be optimists by nature to survive.
But as former MIM Holdings chief executive Norm Fussell was fond of saying: "If you are looking for elephants, you look in elephant country."
The more so if ivory – sorry, copper – and lead and zinc are fetching high prices. The copper price has doubled over the past couple of years. But can present prices be maintained, or nearly so?
Copper last had a similar run back in 1993-94. By mid-1995, however, it was on the way down again and, despite a spike in late 1996 and early 1997, it did not make it back through the $US2000 level until October 2003.
In mid-1999, it was below $US1400 a tonne and it dropped back below that level in October 2001. However, since early 2003, the trend has been up and up.
When China raised interest rates recently, unsettling the copper market momentarily, one copper trader was quoted as saying: "The copper price is $US1.30 a pound (0.45kg) at the moment, and if something happened that brought it down to $US1.20 a pound say, that's nothing to get upset about when we consider that it wasn't that long ago when it was US60¢ a pound."
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an interesting article re cuo and url
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