Ann: Quarterly Activities Report - March 2022, page-6

The QTR report has extremely bugged me and it makes no sense.

MRC completed 345m of drilling on beaches 7 and 10 in the December QTR for the annual mineral resource statement,
The total resource was 2.4mil tonnes at 21.6% THM. The measured resource contained 1.48mil tonnes at 22.83% THM.




The QTR report detailed the following.



MRC mined 361k tonnes at the Northern Beaches with a VHM grade of 8.9%, Why would management mine these lower grade areas rather than focusing on the higher grades (21%) areas that were used for the annual resource statement, Based on the QTR mining rates, MRC could have mined only the northern beaches for the first 6 months of the year and left Tormin beaches to replenish.
This would have allowed MRC to double the amount of concentrate for the QTR if they mined these higher grade areas, which would have provided more flexibility for sales or provide significant amount of concentrate that would be stockpiled ready for sale.

In the QTR report it even provides the following statement from the annual outlook -

There is no expected change to guidance for 2022 provided in the December 2021 quarterly.

If you divide the annual sales guidance (highlighted in yellow) by 4 QTRs the production should be.

Garnet = 37,500 tonnes per QTR
Ilmentite = 30,000 t per QTR
Zircon/Rutile 6,000t per QTR

The Garnet production in the March QTR (right hand side image) is in line with the annual sales guidance based on 1 QTR's production = 24%.
Ilmenite and Zircon/Rutile production is significantly lower than the guidance range, 7.8 - 9% for the QTR rather than 25%

I have to say I am not impressed, was this deliberate to mine the lower grade areas to open the doors for another capital raising?
or was the intention to set an extremely low SP for the Ex Ceo to continue his selling?
Or was it to set a low SP for the directors performance bonus?

the Notice to AGM details several directors are asking for shareholders to approve performance bonuses based on share price performance hitting 19c. I.e they get a bonus for each year the SP is above 19c for the next 3 years.

IMO management is not showing me they are acting in the shareholder's best interest, the cash balance was sitting under US$5mil (now US$2.5mil) this is the time to mine the higher grade zones to build the companies cash reserves and concentrate stockpiles, it lowers the operating costs and increases the Share price. it provides other significant benefits including attracting investors and providing the ability to raise additional funds to increase the production facilities' capacity, which would allow MRC to process the lower grade material. Even with the price of oil (diesel) it would have also made financial sense to focus on the higher grades to reduce the transport costs from beach 10 to the processing facility.


From what I can tell from the satallite images, MRC spent the whole QTR mining beach 10 outside of the areas that were used for the annual resource statement.
.
If you look at beach 7's drill results from the annual reserves, MRC could have targeted grades of up to 50% THM's not mining 8% THM of areas on beach 10.



Seriously, who is the person coming up with the mining plan?