Hi Essa, head grade is an important q, is very much a red flag...

Hi Essa, head grade is an important q, is very much a red flag when discussing with industry insiders, but has been asked many times before and seems to be OK here. STA did some excellent work on the processing side and there is a detailed report released about all that. What remains unproven is the ability to mine at the required throughput, being significantly above what has been done prior, using the same type of equipment, with little visual change from publicly available info. If there are problems with throughput, efficiency goes out the window, and profitability with it.

I have (had!) a vested interest here, given our co developed high throughput dozer mining equipment specifically for this mine to suit the DFS requirements, including a fully tracked mobile machine, designed from the ground up to be high throughput. The DFS requirements were not followed through on, but this was never publicly explained. Rather, the implementation team came along and decided to do what they just did, ie per Cataby. Will it work? Maybe, but the so-called teething stage may stretch on, with expensive fixes. Or not. Only time will tell...

We learnt a bunch of lessons from the process, and others will get the benefits of our high performance tech, given it didn't happen for STA. Interest level is good, but timelines are typically sedentary.

STA is still a buy, as any future problems are only going to elongate the time to full DFS compliance, given the worst case is to buy more mining equipment, at less than 5% of their start-up spend. And that will be happening at much higher SP, taking a battering at the time around that higher number, but always going to recover. It may be a 'bit of a journey', but should be worthwhile to we long term investors.