Interesting stuff on these topics if you do a bit of googling....

Interesting stuff on these topics if you do a bit of googling.

NI small cap takeovers and movement
Firstly Andrew Forrest is grappling with BHP in a takeover battle for the Canadian Noront Resources (TSX-V: NOT).

Closer to AZS home, Kerry Harmanis "is back" and building an interest in small cap Duketon Mining (ASX: DKM) according to some reports.

Who is this Harmanis guy?

He gained a reported $500 million from the sale of his stake in nickel miner Jubilee Mines to Xstrata (now Glencore) in 2007 during in the last nickel boom. Is that all? Well no.

The nickel price at the time was close to US$30,000 a tonne, having peaked a few months earlier at a record US$50,000/t.

AZS relevance: Tony Rovira was leading the team that made the Cosmos nickel discovery for Jubilee mines. He's made plenty of people rich so far and I'd assume he's going to make sure the largesse goes a bit wider this time to include him, just at a guess.

Charateristics of Duketon are interesting for AZS:
Duketon is moving closer to making a fast start on mining the relatively small Rosie nickel, copper, and platinum discovery.

Marginal to most investors, Harmanis saw value in Rosie, doubling his stake in the stock from 9.4% to 18.5% in a mid-year deal where which he bought most of the shares held by St Barbara Mines.

Rosie will probably never be a big project. The orebody is too narrow, and the steep plunge means it will only be developed as a narrow underground mine.

The basic parameters of Rosie are of a steeply dipping structure (a komatiite on its side) containing an estimated 87,100t of nickel, 12,900t of copper and 230,000 ounces of platinum group metals. A scoping study has shown that the resource is good enough to sustain a mine with an eight-year life producing ore grading 2.1% nickel equivalent (nickel plus other metals). Net present value of the project was estimated in the study at $161 million, assuming a nickel price of US$8 a pound (US$17,600/t).

So if this is where Duketon is, at a stage ahead of Andover, more in the way of platinum for sure, but we have cobalt and Cu.
And the Andover resource is yet to be defined. Plus we have the other gold sites at Barton, drilling to commence this quarter.
It's not just Andover, it's Andover + + + etc.

Let's join some more dots...

The outlook for nickel?

Nickel was last trading at US$20,485/t, close to double the price of early last year and potentially heading for US$27,000/t, according to a report earlier this week by Morgan Stanley due to supply constraints from political moves.

The target seems likely IF the Indonesian Government goes through with a proposal to increase export taxes.

Longer term drivers?
Traditional demand in stainless steel and a fast-growing market in the batteries of electric vehicles (EV) with car makers such as Tesla scouring the world for reliable and “clean” supplies of Nickel. (Precisely the type of nickel AZS has have at Andover.)

It is Electric Vehicle 'EV' demand which is behind an increase in nickel sector corporate deals, including a plan by IGO Ltd (ASX: IGO) to acquire Western Areas (ASX: WSA) and BHP’s attempt to buy Noront, which Forrest wants to stop.

If you want to know where I got most of this from try googling my headings.

So we've already got Mark Creasy on board. That should be enough of an indicator. But consider the basic principle of 'follow the money'

Feeling good about my holdings and the fact that we haven't even fully defined what's In VC07, a lot of drilling to go.
The usual whiners are still at it, but they don't seem to have a grip on the big picture. IMO.