Ann: Maiden Garnet Drilling Program Completed, page-26

Inhambane should start to get attention on the back of positive results next month looking at this report.

A strong outlook for mineral sands

Mineral sands demand will continue to grow around that GDP rate moving forward. To fill that demand more supply will need to come into the market.

Production from existing mineral sands mining operations is at best staying flat, but most are starting to diminish as orebody grades fall away.

Existing sources of supply will dry up over the next couple of years, Hay says, and at the moment there are no new major projects in construction.

“There is real potential within the next 3 to 4 years that we could see substantial deficits across the board, in titanium products as well as zircon,” he says.

“We could see some spiking in prices over that period.”

If demand continues its recovery trend the fundamentals could be similar to the period following the global financial crisis, when there was a very steep stimulus-driven price spike.

“Like now, there was almost no investment in new projects, which meant no new supply coming through the pipeline at a time when demand was really taking off,” Hay says.

“That big deficit in supply saw prices hit very high levels — rutile got up to the high $2,000’s/t, zircon was around $3,000/t and ilmenite over $400/t.

“Prices like that had never been seen in the industry before.”


Nic pointing out the Iliminite content in the pans at PG could also become very significant upon results this month