Ann: Coburn Mineral Sands Project Zircon Concentrate Price, page-7

I have noticed the generally credible commentary on HotCopper on GUN / STA over the years and finally signed up to HC - for convenience of reading as much as anything else. The DFS was an excellent body of work and is a solid conservative basis on which to proceed with this mine's development. Two things I noticed were missing were a) a 'preferred tenderers' list, and b) any commentary around absolute time-frames. These omissions are unimportant, just curiosities. This is a great project that will do well, once funded. Why do I say that?

Re a), I run a company that I have good reason to believe will be on this list (when released!) to supply an ~10% chunk of the scope. Obviously I cannot and will not make any public statements about that, but we put our first proposal up in 2007 and have provided several since, so I have watched carefully what has been going on and had many dealings with the changing mgt team.

Re b), the last public statements in Oct 2018 were that a Q3 start was being worked towards. With the very likely 'add-on' of the refining process, it would be hardly surprising if that slips to Q4, but good chance of a start this year. I have no special knowledge here.

What I want to say is it is a long time since I have seen as thoroughly competent and professional a mgt team around a mining start-up (or much else, really) as the current crew. That is self-evidenced by the public domain info, and I am adding well backed up by the behind the scenes work and general approach / attitudes I have observed. If you watch the CEO's video of a presentation he gave, what you see is humble competence shining through, and I have observed that he has selected on and instilled those virtues in his team.

Let me just point one 'tiddly little' DFS factoid thing out. Buried on P32 near the bottom of 'project opportunities' is this one: "▪ Improved process performance including recoveries, throughput and product specification". As others have noted, the general theme of the DFS is conservatism, even ultra-conservatism. With good basis. Yet, right here, we have something that my sense is has a high prospect of materialising, and won't that one drive results! Our tech is well proven equipment configured in an innovative way to give mining flexibility, with 20% higher throughput DESIGNED in - and what miner ever stops there! (Not sanctioning this practice, just noting...).

My 'all factors' view is we are at a point now that is an order of magnitude better than anywhere we have been before for team competence, opportunity maturity and commercial environment, and that is why this project is now a high prospect of proceeding and will undoubtedly be successful. Also, if you read between the lines on the Tanzanian activities, there's some pretty extreme upside sitting right there too - once the crawl, walk, run thing happens...

I just figured you HC lot deserved a bit of 'external' perspective, given how balanced views here seem to be. Disclaimer: Nothing in writing this for me, beyond the bleeding obvious! Although I do intend to take the tech to Iluka and others to see if they could use a productivity boost. We'll see....