Someone obviously hasn't been involved with commissioning before. Things like this are pretty normal and happen all the time with new equipment. Especially since the plant was made in China where there are known quality concerns during fabrication (fingers crossed NSL used a suitable quality inspector) I am pretty happy it's just a pump that had infancy problems but I am surprised they didn't have any spares on site. This is why NSL is completing the optimisation process to ramp up to full production around April to iron out the bugs. I'm not concerned though because we only have the one PO and don't require full production rates to meet the current demand right now (although this will ramp up significantly in due time). Commissioning and optimisation is a process, and you can't/don't want to take any shortcuts because you could severely injure someone.
Nowhere in the announcement did it say the plant has stopped running, just that the slurry pump performance wasn't up to spec. They would still be running at reduced rates to meet BMM's order.
With respect to a stable Fe%, they mentioned in the announcement "the Company has been able to repeatedly beneficiate low grade iron ore waste as low as 14% Fe feed regularly to in excess of 62% Fe". Nough said.
At the start of the quarter the cash in the bank was $4.337M. Cash burn from operations was $1.405M. I think we will be fine as PO's start coming in.
So there might be a delay in 100% production rates but this has minimal impact right now until demand increases. I'm more interested in seeing additional PO's in place (i.e. the demand increases) and how they plan to expand to the next phase.
Sell down is nervous nellies and the stop loss sellers (which is smart) who are most likely those who bought in around 4c during the last announcement which had similar volumes.
Otherwise business as usual
(20min delay)