Andrew's background is a strong selling point. To clarify, I'm not specifically worried about the offtake agreements falling over but I am worried about how the whose project hangs together. For FID Q1 2025 to proceed, all these things need to succeed:
• Resource and mine planning updates following the resource drilling program
• Establishment of an owner’s team
• Finalisation of the construction scope and budget
• Commitments to early works including water and electricity
• Government development consents
• Arrangements with key offtake partners
• Financing for the project development
As a simplifying assumption, let's suppose that each item above has a 90% probability of success.
Those are good odds and you wouldn't look at any one item and sweat too much about it falling over.
However, if you look at the odds from a whole of project perspective, the odds of every single item succeeding is only 50%.
If we reduce the probability of success per item to 85%, the chance of a failure increases to 70%.
Going back to the real world, the modelling is more complicated but it's an interesting exercise to show that, as things stand, there's a legitimate case to be made for justifying a big discount to NPV depending on how you think things will unfold.
If one of the above does fall over, failure of course is the worst case scenario but even a delay at this point would sting. Compare this recent quarterly (5.7 million spend, 3.31 quarters remaining):
https://announcements.asx.com.au/asxpdf/20240426/pdf/062wvgb0bkz1hs.pdf
to 31 July 2023 quarterly (3 million spend, 3.68 quarters remaining)
https://announcements.asx.com.au/asxpdf/20230731/pdf/05s4kr1k65tlfl.pdf
Going back to mid-2023, there's more tolerance built in for delay because the company only needed to accommodate 3 million spend per quarter with the ability to raise equity with a share price in the mid-20s, early 30s depending on timing.
Fast forward to now, if something goes wrong we're looking at a double whammy of needing to raise nearly twice as much money at a share price that's only around half.
In short I have every expectation that Aura will continue kicking goals for each of the items above. But I still breathe a little sigh of relief each time a milestone is met because it knocks one of the legs out of the bear case for Aura. As of right now, there are more legs than I'd like for the bears to stand on but as each leg is taken away, the range of outcomes for Aura narrows, and the share price should start converging accordingly.
(20min delay)