re: the hard questions Thanks for the reply's guys. It was...

re: the hard questions Thanks for the reply's guys. It was mentioned on the ozestock board by a poster that capital expenditure my be including in the production costs, so I thought I would do a little digging.

Now I would assume that cost of production should remain at a fairly stable percentage of revenue from sales. This is so because the same process is used to get the goods out of the ground and over to the smelter. So if the grades remain fairly consistent the ratio of sales to production costs should be fairly constant now that the mine has been in steady production for a while (this can be manipulated - for example if they stoped production today, production costs would be zero but all the stuff on the way to the smelter and in the varoius stages of production would produce sales).

However when I look at the last three quaters I get the following.

August 03 (4th Qtr) - Production = $6,255,000
Sales = $7,735,000
Percentage = 80%

Nov 03 (1st Qtr) - Production = $6,383,000
Sales = $10,463,000
Percentage = 60%

Jan 04 (2nd Qtr) - Production = $8,728,000
Sales = $9,182,000

Percentage = 95%

As you can see massive variations here. These percentages should be un-affected by stuff like development, exploration, admin costs, repayments of RMB etc etc. So why the large variation?

Charlie