I liken Ramelius's business model to that of a sawmill.Sawmill...

I liken Ramelius's business model to that of a sawmill.

Sawmill owners typically will buy 'stumpage'; that is, the right to log someone else's woodlot, paying a fee based on a set of trees that the sawmill's foresters have marked for cutting. Those trees are then trucked to the mill, and processed into marketable form.

Sometimes, it makes more business sense to buy a woodlot outright, so over time a sawmill typically builds a portfolio of woodlots. Given time to mature after a cut, these woodlots can act as 'base load' to the mill, filling in during times when not enough economic stumpage is available.

The sawmill's business then ends up being wisely evaluating woodlots, husbanding your liquidity and timing your buys, managing cutting crews and equipment and otherwise controlling costs, and knowing when to be aggressive and when to be conservative. Note that the typical sawmill runs a hub(s) and spokes arrangement, as Ramelius does, where raw material is trucked to a central location(s).

Ramelius's business model is different, in my view, from many other miners which are more tied to a given set of deposits. Ramelius is less tied to a set of deposits, and in particular more likely to move on from a given deposit. Ramelius consists, to a relatively large degree, of the employees and equipment and business experience used to profitably 'harvest' the selected ore deposits, rather than a set of deposits. I'm not saying Ramelius doesn't have a portfolio of deposits that it owns, just that it's identity is less defined by those deposits, and more defined by the tools of it's 'hubs and spokes' business model, than other miners.

So Mark and Tim's evaluation process, when looking over prospective ore deposits, consists of "can we make a profit mining the known resource".