Carso181 - KOTH production figures for June will be interesting though I'm not convinced the Half Year production result will "shoot the lights out".
At the end of May, RED had produced 78,539 ounzes over the preceding 5 months. To reach MINIMUM guidance for the Half Year, at least 11,461 more ounzes will have had to have been produced in June.
If throughput and recovery rates achieved in May at KOTH are matched in June as well (remembering the plant didn't operate for a couple of days in May), and the grade is 1.2 (as per what they estimated is in the stockpile when they delivered the May production details rather than the 1.8 they processed in May), then these numbers suggest June production could be as low as 12,700 ounzes odd. Hopefully this is a "worst case" and I have an uneducated hunch that June's result won't be that low because total throughput for the month won't be affected by any days the plant was offline.
But even if it is that low, this would leave RED with production for the Half Year of 91,200 ounzes odd - a creditable effort but as I said above hardly "shooting the lights out" in relation to production guidance given. And not exactly backing up managements recent stated policy of under-promising and over-delivering.
Still, June production may surprise on the upside - either by achieving good throughput or impressive grades, but more likely the former.
And even if the June result turns out to be as low as the 12,700 ounzes figure mentioned above, it'd still represent a production level of just over 50,000 ounzes for the Quarter (or an annualised rate of about 200,000 ounzes). Though this sort of production into the future would be dependent on grades achieved being around the 1.6 mark I'd reckon, and I wonder if that's possible. I'll be watching what the grade was in June pretty closely.
The real acid test for RED shareholders will come in a few weeks when the company (finally) discloses what its AISC and total cost structure is and therefore gives us an indication of what sort of underlying profitability may be achieved from here on.
Not down-ramping colincj - just a bit of on-going reflection/speculation.
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