SBK, I am quite an ignorant and lazy person by nature and don't really bother to find out a lot of things in life so I could be completely wrong here.
All these years APG has WIM150, I have never heard anybody, except you, said it is worth any money. However, it is only your claim and I can't find any evidence to support it.
What I can vaguely remember is:
1. Since APG got WIM150, it has never spent a penny on it. No BFS, no exploration, no mining, never produced anything and never generated any cash.
2. APG would rather spend its last penny fiddling around with the demo plant and farmed out 80% earning interest to AZC just to do a BFS. That seems to give an idea how much APG thinks of WIM150. AZC was so poor it couldn't even afford to do the BFS. If WIM150 is such a gem, why wouldn't any other company with a couple of bucks in the bank account went for the deal instead of AZC?
3. When DCM runs low on cash, AZC is among the first thing they were to sell. If it is such a gold mine (oh, Zircon mine really), why is there no bidding war for it?
4. I don't know how much DCM sold AZC for but I don't think it will be much. As usual, I am too lazy to find out.
5. In all these years APG has WIM150, nobody but OZC expressed any interest in buying it. Just because OZC is interested in it does not mean WIM150 is worth a lot. Alan Bond paid $900M for Channel 9 some years ago but that did not mean Channel 9 was worth $900M. As poor Alan found out 3 years later, it was only worth $250M. Why didn't the executives of Bond Corp (I think it was once the 4th larget company in Australia) and its advisors see that coming?
6. Why didn't the Wall Street elites like Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Bear Stern et al. see that the trillions of dollars of toxic loans they were holding were going to explode in their faces? Why didn't General Motors and Chrysler see that the big, fat and inefficient cars they have been producing for decades were not fashionable any more and it took a near death experience for them to find out?
7. Why do I find it not surprising that Iluka did not see that coming? If they had, they should have invested in APG to lower their costs and produce higher quality TiO2 instead of sitting on their fat, complacent bottoms watching their value drop by more than half in less than a year.
8. As far as I know, almost everyone in China already has a roof over their heads.
I personally think that APG has made an excellent decision selling WIM150 for $7.5M and use the money to complete the demo plant and move on to the better things in life.
Of course, with these things, only time can tell. May be in a few years time WIM150 will be worth trillions of dollars such that the labour party (heaven forbids if they are still around) would introduce a special WIM150 tax to fund their increased dole handouts.
APG Price at posting:
3.7¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
