Ann: Revised Shipping Strategy Yields Substantial Cost Reduction, page-94

Gosh I can imagine Rocket posting in the Evergrande Hot Copper..... like using the chinese translator every 5 seconds and telling everybody he sold at $6,000, and blah blah blah.


Now into serious staff, I have analysed the other point announced today, which noone, not even Rocket even he though he has an IQ 200, commented yet.

This is the related to the Ore Grade.

While we all know producing 33% over 32%, ends up in an increase of revenue of 3% (~1/32), the effort of reaching 33% is not just over 3% (possibly lot higher). And the difference exacerbates, as the grade diff widens, difference bet 28% - 33%, 17% revenue gap.

Now, yesterday I have attended presentation of a sorter for my industry. Was promised 2 tn/h capacity, by the time the testing was done, excuses here, excuses there, limitations galore, ended up being suggested that the unit would do 0.5 tn/h throughput for my plant.

In summary, this might be the dilemma (with solution in this case) here, i.e. possibly the need to re-run the whole day production over the Sorter again, hence you can only do a "daily" production in 2 days, not one, keeping all fix and some variable costs in play.


If that is the case, I can see the need at the beginning of the operation to play with these options, maybe using Coolagudgi (?) (the other higher grade pit), to test the limit of beneficiation, at expenses of productivity and to test quality/results, etc, and with the thinking of 'let's concentrate this to max" to minimise "transport cost (truck/ship)". BUT when you crunch the numbers, it appears to me that from a bottomline perspective it is more profitable to operate at 28%, if we can unlock full nameplate like this, and even it it just improves throughput by 50% from what it is today. Presume this is the bottleneck, not the digging.

Happy to share my calcs, but I want to avoid Rocket hurting my feelings telling me off because I don't remember the Pythagoras Theorem.

Long term solution might well be getting another Sorter (or whichever is the bottleneck equipment) for this line, or going straight to much bigger units on Expansion stage.

Sometimes trying to save a bit of capital designing things too tight, costs you from opex viewpoint in the long run.

Solutions are always there, money is in the Bank. Patience required.