Yeah - its all about asset values and synergies, others have...

Yeah - its all about asset values and synergies, others have made some good posts about this but the assets of SBM do have value in the hands of competent management - by most measures the current board of SBM have totally failed on the question of competency at operating mines and recent events have shown them to also be incompetent at the asset selection/corporate M&A level.

I am thinking that SLR do want to unlock the synergies of Gwalia and mine it properly (as others have said, Gwalia is in a problematic low-grade high cost part of the mining sequence at the moment, but things could be done to adjust and get through this and back into the profitable higher grade parts of the mine), the Atlantic assets could be disposed of to a TSX listed Canadian gold miner who could bang some heads together and get better leverage, Simberi could also be disposed of and I am thinking that Harmony Gold would be the logical buyer of Simberi, or Simberi could be spun off as a separate vehicle to make transactions M&A easier.....

Raleigh Findlayson and GMD are also reasonably shrewd operators so I'm not underestimating them.

Whatever happens - as long as the SBM board are shown the door things will work out for the better somehow, this disconnect between the AUD price of gold and the value of ASX gold miners is unsustainable in the long term and I predict a lot more M&A action before the gold price rises further and/or valuations get adjusted upwards. Assuming no more black swan events and price of gold and exchange rates don't do anything too crazy.