Ann: Ramelius reaches 90% in AOP takeover, page-37

A bit over a month since I last compared Ramelius with Silver Lake.

As a reminder, starting in late 2020 Ramelius started making big noise about how they were going to acquire a third operating hub, with metrics at least as good as their two existing hubs, and which would immediately push Ramelius into the next tier of gold producers, producers upwards of 500k oz a year. But instead Ramelius wimped it and bought a very timid Rebecca exploration project which ticks none of the boxes Ramelius has set. They paid a gross $181m for the owner of Rebecca, Apollo (about $30m less net).

It just so happened that the Ramelius peer, Silver Lake, decided to throw $181m of its lazy cash for pretty much what Ramelius said it would do, another operating hub. This was in the form of a busted up Canadian mine producer, Harte.

At the time I said I would check back regularly to see how the two mid tier goldies fare subsequent to their major acquisitions.

Just for the fun of it, I will start assembling a running table, using the figures from 5 February as a base:

	Market cap		share price
	RMS	SLR	RMS	SLR
05-Feb-22	1.00	1.00	1.00	1.00
11-Mar-22	1.17	1.43	1.16	1.40

Silver Lake with its broken Harte is off to a flyer compared to Ramelius and its dowdy Rebecca. Stay tuned for an occasional update.

Just by way of further comparison according to this list of 188 ASX gold companies both Silver Lake and Ramelius are among the top 10 ASX gold miners in terms of market cap. But Ramelius at number 10 is a good 17 times smaller than the biggest miner, Newcrest, and 9 times smaller than the second biggest, Northern Star. In my eyes both Silver Lake and Ramelius should be pushing hard to fill that huge gap between the top dogs and themselves. It seems that only of them might be.

Here is a list of top 10 biggest ASX goldies by market cap (https://www.listcorp.com/asx/sectors/materials/materials/metals-mining/gold):