The IPO window has been well and truly open for would-be junior explorers for the past 18 months, and it’s hard to imagine there is much unpegged ground around Australia left to leverage into a float.
With that in mind, it’s cheering to see a company with some actual prospective tenements, management with a track record, and some heavyweight backers taking a run-up at the bourse. That company is Demetallica, effectively a spinout of the copper and base metals assets of Minotaur Exploration, swallowed up by Adelaide-based Andromeda Metals in a scrip deal earlier this year.
Andromeda’s interest was in consolidating the kaolin project jointly held by the two companies, with Minotaur’s base metals assets always destined for a spinout. Demetallica is chasing $12m-$15m at 25c a share to complete its listing, through joint lead managers Argonaut and Euroz Hartleys.
Copper heavyweights OZ Minerals and Sandfire Resources will both be substantial shareholders if the company gets the offer away, courtesy of deals cut by Demetallica to consolidate Minotaur’s joint ventures with the pair into a larger 2000sq km land package in Queensland’s rich Cloncurry region.
The package, now renamed Chimera, already has a combined resource base of 17 million tonnes of mineralised ore, for 154,000 tonnes of copper and 107,000 ounces of gold, but there’s plenty more drilling to be done. The tenement pack also surrounds AIC Mines’ Eloise copper mine, where former Evolution Mining executive Aaron Colleran is busy drilling away to find an extension of the current deposit and extend the operation’s life.
Demetallica also holds a big package of ground north of OZ Minerals’ Prominent Hill mine in South Australia, where the copper producer is funding a $1.4m round of “proof of concept” drilling into three prospective targets. It also holds ground near South32’s Cannington base metals mine, along with gold tenements south of Townsville.
