Hello Saragian,
I hope all is well with you and yours, and -with gratitude - (gold is good despite my favourite being much deg-graded?),
here is synchronistic story from The West last Friday.
It stars and gives background to the ‘colourful ’ human face of executive chairman, Peter Cook, who is soon to step down, and who, understanding markets and mining, has driven many of the ups and downs depicted in your image.
The journo says it is the end of an era which raises the question ‘and then what?’
...Hard for anyone else to step into such big shoes although the Westgold board and executive management was ‘streamlined’ as of last July to set strong foundations for ‘next stage evolution’.
Peter said at the time that the reorganisation .. “sets a strong foundation for the next phase of Westgold’s evolution.
“Coming out of a significant growth phase, these changes have been introduced to enhance project accountability, to ensure consistent delivery of outcomes along with long-term sustainable gold production," Peter noted.” [The Market Herald]
Looking at your chart the foundation-laying, along with the price of gold, has been going well?
INSIDER: Peter Cook — the miner with a heart of gold
Main Image: Peter Cook is executive chairman with Westgold Resources. Credit: Ross Swanborough/The West Australian
Tess IngramThe West Australian
Fri, 20 November 2020 10:26AM
For many, gold symbolises opulence and extravagance.
Peter Cook is the antithesis.
Authentic, forthright and unpretentious, Cook limps into our lunch in a blue shirt and jeans, with a lanyard laden with keys around his neck.
About two weeks prior, he was building a fence at his son’s house and a falling angle grinder caressed his shin, resulting in a mean row of stitches. A mining industry executive for three decades, “Cooky” is known as a colourful and inveterate renegade who isn’t shy of speaking his mind or delivering cheeky conference presentations.
But Cook is more complex than that.
“I like it (gold) because it has no real value,” he tells Insider. “It only has intrinsic value and the market understands that. From the early churches to chalices, they didn’t make them out of platinum, they made them out of gold. It is a really unique metal ... and from an exploration perspective why would you want to look for something like coal or lead or zinc. But gold ...”
In 1851, flecks of gold were found in a waterhole near Bathurst, New South Wales.
Six months later, gold was discovered in Ballarat, Victoria, sparking the country’s famous gold rush. Ballarat was also where Cook got his start in mining, graduating with a degree in geology in 1983.
The boy from Broken Hill then came out west and the rest is history.
Cook, 57, does not have a high profile outside the mining industry but he is well known within it. “My philosophy has always been to let everyone know your name but let no one know what you look like,” he says with a chuckle.
People started to talk about Cook in 1996 when, along with Sydney stockbroker Peter “Talky” Newton, he bought the Hill 50 gold operation from major miner Western Mining Corporation for $15 million.
“We did it through the shell of a tiny company called Wattle Gully Gold Mines,” Cook says.
“I remember WMC saying to us, so Wattle Gully has a market cap of about $4 million and it has $2m in the bank, how are you going to pay for this?
Oh, we said, we will raise the money through the market. They didn’t believe us. I did my first international roadshow in 1996 ... we were raising at 35¢ per share and we raised just over $20m, five times the company’s market cap.”
BUY LOW, SELL HIGH
That deal heralded one of Cook’s trademarks — buying unloved assets at basement prices and revitalising them before selling them on.
With Newton, who became a long-term associate, Cook did this with Hill 50 and, a year later, another venture Abelle.
The companies were bought by South Africa's Harmony Gold Mining Company for $233m and $155m respectively, generating massive returns for the companies’ backers and the duo.
“Buy low, sell high,” Cook tells me. “Everything has a value and everything is for sale at the right price. Then once you’ve got it, never be in a hurry.
“There will always be someone in this industry who thinks they can do a better job than you.
And the other most important thing is we have never done anything with debt so we have never lost control of our decision-making processes.”
Taking a long-term view, defying the market and betting on an asset nobody wants is not easy, let alone proving the market wrong and making it sing.
Newton says there are two things that enable Cook to do this — his smarts and his conviction.
Mark Paterson, Peter Newton & Peter Cook in the field. Credit: unknown/supplied
Cook likes to “put himself across as the larrikin”, Newton says, but is actually “one of the most intelligent people I have come across”.
“I discovered Cooky in the 80s and I said ‘you and I have to do something together’.
You meet a lot of geologists but you don’t meet a lot of geologists who understand mining and the market as well. Out of the two of us he was 98 per cent of the brains, I was 2 per cent.”
In the early 2000s, Newton and Cook took on Bluestone Tin and turned around its troubled Renison Bell operation, one of the world’s largest and highest grade tin mines. A merger and several deals later, Bluestone Tin became Metals X, expanding into nickel, gold and copper.
Here Cook ploughed away as CEO, buying and selling mines, until late 2016 when Metals X demerged its gold assets into Westgold Resources.
Cook went with them, back to the irresistible allure of gold.
THE COOKY CHARACTER
Gold is malleable and ductile — it bends and stretches. Cook, again, is neither of these things. He has the bearing of a rugby player, suggesting limited flexibility, and he is firm in his views.
“You’ve got to maintain your own character,” he says, as we tuck into our mains. “I’ll never change for anyone, I’m too old for it. So I’m always at risk in this society for telling the truth, because people don’t like to hear the truth.
That’s the modern world, propagated by mass media ... it’s the sensationalist unchecked fact in the story that often trips people up. You’ve got to go and get the full story.”
Cook tells a good story. Over the course of lunch, the father of five shares a string of corporate anecdotes and also speaks of the time WA billionaire Gina Rinehart scolded him for an unrehearsed speech, encountering a swarm of bees which netted him 150 stings and a stubborn pet goat called Gregory.
My philosophy has always been to let everyone know your name but let no one know what you look like
Cook also makes bold and sometimes controversial statements.
He talks down the use of gender quotas on corporate boards.
He has accused investors of having short-term trading mentalities.
He thinks regulation is strangling the industry.
But like the sensationalist media articles he refers to, these statements often trip people up. There is more to the story if you look for it.
While he doesn’t believe in quotas, for example, he is an advocate for attracting more women to mining, particularly in operational roles, to correct the gender imbalance in the industry’s workforce and ultimately see more women around the boardroom table. He says the industry needs to focus on improving the number of women applying for mining roles on site.
His wife Joan was an underground mining geologist and, Cook claims, the only one in the State in the mid-1980s.
He rails at excessive regulation, arguing “prescriptive thinking” has invaded the mines department and turned it “from a revered mines inspector that you could rely on for opinion and guidance ... to a multi-disciplined platoon of parking inspectors trying to fine you for every misdemeanour”.
The industry needs to get better at promoting its social and economic benefits, he argues, and governments need to acknowledge the industry’s contribution and reduce regulation.
A DIGGER & A DEALER
And he defends the Diggers and Dealers mining conference in Kalgoorlie in the debate about skimpies — topless or scantily-clad female bartenders.
A mainstay of Kalgoorlie watering holes, they attract headlines during the annual conference when the corporate world collides with the frontier town. In this debate, Cook has been labelled by some as a staunch defender of industry justifying outdated traditions but his views are more nuanced than that.
“My personal view is, they shouldn’t be there at all,” he said of the skimpies, but adds that it’s not for people out of town to tell Kalgoorlie how to behave.
Cook suggests the conference could offer alternative evening entertainment. True to his word, Cook offered something different, taking to the stage with his band The Smoking Guns to belt out AC/DC covers. The venue was full, the set was a hit and there wasn’t a skimpie in sight.
“Cooky has always been an individual,” Newton says. “He is very unique in this mining industry, he thinks a lot deeper on the bigger issues and he speaks his mind. Where other people think it but don’t have the guts to say it, Cooky has the guts.”
Peter Cook with Westgold’s Mark Pateron and Phil Wilding at the Kinsella open pit at Cue. Credit: unknown/supplied
Cook loves mining, he loves Diggers and it’s clear he wants the fun, irreverent culture of the industry to find a way to continue in the 2020s.
Since Diggers commenced in Kalgoorlie in 1992, Cook has attended every year.
About five years ago, Cook decided the shop talk on the Diggers stage had gone too far. So he decided to wear his North Melbourne AFL jersey, blast the team’s song and poke fun at some of the industry’s bigger names. He put up images comparing mining executives with cartoon characters and celebrities, and has done so every year since.
His appearance on the stage at the 2020 forum was his last.
After almost 30 years leading mining companies, and representing them at nearly as many Diggers, in a few weeks Cook will step back from day-to-day company management. He plans to complete a transition to non-executive chairman at Westgold before the end of the year.
He is also non-executive chairman of explorer Castile Resources.
“It’s time to give someone else a chance,” Cook explains. “You just get consumed with all of these day-to-day things that take away (from) what I have got left to add, that is strategy and views. I need to go back to that and sit and think and work my way through strategy.”
END OF AN ERA
Tim McCormack, a Perth-based mining analyst at stockbroker Canaccord Genuity, has known Cook and covered his stocks for about a decade.
McCormack says few other mining company leaders have traded assets as successfully, and few have challenged investors as intently.
“I have been in a meeting where a fund manager was challenging him on share price performance relevant to the peer group or something like that and he said to them ‘how many shares have you got? I’ll buy them off you this afternoon’.
Other CEOs in the sector wouldn’t say that,” McCormack says.
"He’s always had a really deep belief in what he is doing. Sometimes what he does takes longer than people want but what he’s done over his career has created a huge amount of wealth and I think that moment really underscores his stoic character.”
Peter Newton and Peter Cook at the Broad Arrow Tavern in Kanowna. Credit: supplied
Cook says Westgold is focused on producing gold in WA and doing it well.
Since its listing in December 2016, shares in Westgold have risen from $1.72 per share to a high of $2.84 per share in late October, a 65 per cent increase.
“This one is really special to me with Westgold,” he says. “Previously we have had the opportunity to buy one mine in one area. Here we have put a whole region together. So every one of those old mining centres is now under the one company and there is flexibility and longevity that comes with that.”
Some industry players suggest the sector has evolved beyond industry stalwarts like Cook, and even Cook admits there have been times when he felt like he was “done with it”, particularly during the battle with the McGowan Government over the rate for gold royalties in 2017.
But as I end my call with Newton, he pulls me back for one last word. “When Cooky steps down, I think it is the end of an era,” he says.
“You are seeing the last of the people who really say what they believe. I think the whole industry is becoming so politically correct that the industry is going to be a lot poorer for his going. The other guys haven’t got the balls to say it when it needs to be said, that’s the reality.”
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