Most likely stagnate for reasons you state. Cost of funding up,...

Most likely stagnate for reasons you state. Cost of funding up, cost of building anything up, price of copper likely to trend lower (typically highly correlated with economic growth).

Bunker down and ride it out should be the aim of the game.

The approach thus far has been to grow an already enormous resource. Absent a hail mary of an intercept the market just doesn't care. More low grade resource doesn't exactly improve the start up equation, it just prolongs the life of the asset. Sure the faithfuls will argue it offers economies of scale with a larger operation. It does but with that comes additional capex, which currently seems insurmountable.

CE has sold this story for years, across the globe. Im not sure what else he could do to change things. The market just isnt getting excited. The NA investors who understand big copper certainly are not.

A project like this would typically see 60-70% debt / equity funding. At a usd1 - usd1.5bn capex tickeg vs current market cap of ~aud115m the equation can't be solved.

Glencore staked their claim pretty cheap and will likely pick up the rest at some stage. It isn't in their interest to part fund this alongside hch. Much simpler approach would be to buy the asset if they have conviction.

Alternatively hch could explore a sell down at project to someone else to assist with the funding task. But again why would anyone put up any meaningful capital at multiples of the company's current mc.

Aimo