Hi BLOG,I’m not going to defend management on the poor...

Hi BLOG,
I’m not going to defend management on the poor performance at PH. In hindsight, the announcement at the end of 2011 that the strip ratio was going to increase was an indicator that things could go pear shaped . As it turns out the strip ratio increase was under conservative as they still had the slide about a year ago. Whether the pit slide could have been prevented by better management, who knows….being overly conservative with these things also destroys shareholder value. What is disappointing in my view is the time taken to recover from the slide and the two consecutive production downgrades.
Back to Big C, the grade and resource compares favourably to other block cave mines, check out the grades at NCM’s ridgeway mine, which is the company’s best performing asset. The initial 20 year mine reserve will also only take the higher grade material. I think the bigger concern is whether OZL can self-fund such a big project without taking on too much risk.
Bottom line is that Big C is the light at the end of the tunnel for OZL, so if they change direction or can’t pull it off the company is proper f@$ked!