I'm
trying to bridge my knowledge gap about this company. I'll use this post as a record of which tyres I've kicked so far.
Leadership:Robert Kirtlan: Non-Executive Chairman - joined Board on 23 May 2017, appointed as non-executive chair on 26 June 2017
Mark Wallace: Non-Executive Director - joined Board on 26 June 2017 as a non-executive director. From day one he held 43.6m shares (about 8.5% of the registry at the time). Still holds about 5% of the registry.
Mark Connelly: Non-Executive Director - joined Board on 17 February 2022 - has hands on experience running mining companies, though those mining companies were gold miners in Africa
Edward Fry: Exploration Manager, first mention I could find of him in this context is the 2022 AGM presentation of 29 November that year referred to him as a Competent Person regarding geological statements - not about Mongoose - and noted he was a consultant to the company. But by 6 February 2023 a similar statement referred to him as an employee of the company. It seems that EF took up a job with the company at around the start of 2023. Coincidentally or not on 16 January 2023 the company announced that Glencore had agreed for the company to assume control of Mongoose from a Glencore entity.
In summary it seems to me, that the Board has no great
technical expertise, nor has the company actually had anyone filling a top level management role in recent years. They do get bonus points for running the show lean and mean but I wonder if they have the necessary skills sets on hand.
How shareholders have fared:When RK took the reins in mid-2017 there were about 514 million shares issued. The last count I found was from 8 May this year which showed there were about 1,230 million shares issued. That means that during RK's rule investors who have continued to hold this company's shares have been diluted by about 58%. It is also true that in that period the share price has doubled. Nevertheless the bottom line is that this company has not been a good news story for long term holders in the time that RK has been at the helm.
The company's focus before now: It seems to me, from what I've read, this company has reinvented itself a number of times, including with a name change in May 2018 from Overland Resources to Renegade Exploration. It has tried its hand exploring in Canada and in WA and more recently around Mt Isa in Qld, looking for various minerals but with little luck or success. It might be unfair to describe them as a lifestyle company but I do think it is fair to say that for much of their existence they have never quite found their groove. To put it bluntly, they've been a chronic plodder, a journeyman, a serial also ran.
As I noted above, once again they reached yet another new start in early 2023 when they succeeded in taking charge of that tenement containing the Mongoose deposit adjacent to the Cloncurry township. But even the shallow Mongoose offers relatively scant reward seeing Renegade owns less than 30% of the Mongoose tenement (EPM8588) - at this point they have less than 30% of 3m tonnes which I'm guessing is not a company maker.
The company's focus going forward:But the moves in early 2023 to take on Mongoose operations and to employ Edward Fry might well have been the catalyst for Renegade to finally be onto a winner. As RF pointed out during his Gold Coast presentation, the obvious question to ask is where is all the copper being found in the shallow Mongoose pits coming from. And it seems from RK's generous praise that Edward Fry stepped up and sussed out the answer: Mongoose Deeps. From memory, RK said that it took many months to decode the data but by February this year they had a good grasp of what they were looking at. The first reference I could find in any ASX announcement of Mongoose Deeps was the Qld government grant announcement of 11 April (so this stuff is still very much hot off the presses).
To go with the business acumen in taking charge of the EPM8588 tenement and the technical acumen in possibly identifying the Mongoose Deeps prospect came two spots of luck: EF was able to crack the case using only publicly available data (as in not proprietary data provided by any Glencore entity) and the bulk of the prospect appears to lie in a tenement that Glencore does not have an ownership interest in: EPM28972. The consequence of that luck may be that Mongoose Deeps is very much Renegade's baby.
EPM28972 is an interesting story in itself. From the December 2023 quarterly report it seems Renegade only acquired the tenement during that quarter. And going on the schematics in the Gold Coast presentation the tenement covers part of the actual residential area of Cloncurry (whether that presents as a problem further down the track).
An Ernest Henry analogue:Renegade says that Mongoose Deeps is an Ernest Henry style prospect. Here is a
link to an article I found that describes EH (apologies if this has already been posted).
My "conclusions":My conclusion is that I still do not know what is going on. I question whether these guys have the technical nous to crack a blind breccia pipe when Glencore's geo teams could not. On the other hand this may be the making of Edward Fry. I picked up on the sizzle from Robert Kirtlan's Gold Coast presentation. On the other hand this is maybe the third or fourth restart of Renegade under RK and all the previous times turned out to be false starts. So I've gone for caution and decided to only have a dabble with some funds I am willing to quickly lose. Good luck to us holders!
