indochine in today's the australian newspaper

Hey IDC Holders

Looks like the market is starting to wake up to IndoChine Mining!

A Great article by Barry Fitzgerald has included IndoChine Mining in an article in today’s The Australian Newspaper.

His article explains the benefits for small cap explorers and mine developers when big miners cut back production/investment in their mines. This reduces future supply, keeping prices high, so when small caps find a deposit, it makes them viable. Mt Kare on the other hand will not only be very low cost, but very large in size, if you read the presentations made by Mr Promnitz and his team!

As for IndoChine Mining, I love the Bonanza Grades we are going to see in the coming months! 100-400 grams per tonne of gold grades are very very very rare!

The market is slowly waking up to Mt Kare, just as the company making milestones are upon us!

Cheers Nectar

Giant cutbacks are good for the minor miners
• by: BARRY FITZGERALD
• From: The Australian
• December 11, 2012 12:00AM

Source: The Australian

GOOD news for the junior end of the mining industry. Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton are slashing more than $US1 billion ($954.3 million) combined from their annual exploration budgets as their respective austerity programs in response to weaker commodity prices go into overdrive, or overreaction, depending on the point of view.

How much more than a combined $US1bn is being cut is not known. Rio has been nice and upfront about its minerals exploration effort, saying there would be $US1bn less spent for the remainder of this year and all of next year than was previously the case. Mind you, Rio's figure includes evaluation exploration work, and more of what the rest of the industry would classify as brownfields, or near-mine exploration.

Still, cuts under way at BHP in its fair-dinkum greenfields exploration program mean that the total pullback by the big two of the industry will carry the combined annual figure to well beyond $US1bn.

Industry chatter is that, like Rio, BHP has gone cold on minerals exploration, even if it is the lifeblood of an industry that has as its very foundation the depletion of its underpinning resource base.

The chatter has been that BHP is slashing its annual mineral exploration (minex) effort by about 70 per cent. Based on its 2012 financial-year spend of $US1.1bn, that would represent a cut of about $US770m. What's more, the talk is that BHP intends looking for copper in the Andes and pretty much nothing else.

BHP is not commenting on how severe its cuts are. And while it would seem likely that the full 70 per cent haircut suggested on minex is an exaggeration, a haircut of sorts is taking place.

What is known is that BHP has been cutting costs and reducing overheads across the business, and that it has reduced the headcount of minex people at its shiny new Perth office.

The Singapore head office for minex is still there but it is a lonely sort of place, given the strategic shift in focus to Andean copper means the minex headcount in BHP's Santiago office in Chile is bigger and growing.

Officially at least, BHP is saying it remains committed to minex activity in key commodities, adding that, yep, it does hold an extensive Andean greenfield exploration land position where it is ramping up activity on a number of multi-year copper exploration programs.

Now all that is sort of interesting from the junior end's perspective. In the near term, it means less competition for ground from the big boys of the industry and less competition for mining and the professional services.

Juniors working on near-term development opportunities are already reporting that having had to deal with the B-team at engineering outfits, they are now being offered the services of the A-team. Costs are coming down as a result, with truck drivers through to geologists and others all of a sudden worried as much about their security of tenure as the rest of us.

In the longer term, the minex cutbacks by the majors mean that less of the new deposits needed to replace existing operations will be discovered, making anything a junior company finds all that more important, as well as raising future supply concerns that won't hurt the broad sweep of mineral commodity prices.

But more telling will be the response of investors. Ongoing exposure to the diversified and low-cost operations of Rio and BHP is a given. But for the sort of leveraged exposure that only mineral exploration can deliver, it will be the juniors that stand to benefit -- assuming that investors come to the party and loosen their vice-like grip on equity funding.

Equity funding for a quality exploration project or development project by a junior always has, and always will, get funding. That the rubbish out there faces a tough time in rasing capital next year is beyond doubt. But for the quality programs and projects, it won't be as tough as many are tipping.

Rio and BHP have just enhanced their leveraged appeal, as well as taking the pressure off future capital and operating costs.

Indochine (IDC)

INDOCHINE is one of the juniors that stands to benefit from that scenario. Its planned $US218m development of the Mount Kare gold-silver project in Papua New Guinea could conceivably be looking at a start-up cost of more like $US200m by the time it starts spending to meet a current first production target of 150,000-160,000 ounces of gold a year in 2015.

Mind you, that's not the reason two of the world's biggest mining investment fund managers, BlackRock and Capital Group, can be found on the share register with holdings of 8.6 per cent and 5 per cent respectively.

They are in it for the leverage to the upside, with Mount Kare holding the promise of becoming something much more than its current rating as a 1.8 million-ounce gold resource (28.3 million tonnes grading 1.9 grams of gold a tonne).

An update on the resource is not far off, but the real near-term interest in the stock is whether or not Mount Kare hosts the same sort of bonanza quartz veins that got Placer Dome's (now part of Barrick) Porgera goldmine, about 15km to the northeast, going all those years ago.
Generally speaking, bonanza grades in goldmining terms means 100g-400g a tonne gold.

Porgera started on a five-million-ounce resource contained in the so-called Zone VII, which graded a massive 27g/tonne gold. There is good reason to think that Mount Kare too could have the same later-stage zones of high-grade mineralisation.

Ongoing drilling and pending assay results could be worth watching on that front, given Indochine's market capitalisation of $83m (11.5c a share) is not particularly challenging on the existing resource alone. Those who took stock in the group's recent placement at 14c a share will be hoping that is the case.

TNG (TNG)
FROM the update file comes news that Northern Territory specialist TNG Limited went into a trading halt yesterday ahead of an exploration update on its Mount Hardy copper project.

As mentioned on October 24, when the stock was 11c a share, a drill bit was about to put Mount Hardy's promise to the ultimate test.

Some early results saw TNG edge up to 14c a share before the trading halt -- which, funnily enough, was not related to results pulled from TNG's latest drilling program but from a drilling program at Mount Hardy supervised by the old Bureau of Mineral Resources way back in 1968.
The core was found in Alice Springs and was sent away for assaying by TNG.

It returned assays worthy of TNG having earlier gone in the trading halt. Best results included 10.7m at 4.1 per cent copper from near the surface and 7m at 1.64 per cent copper from 35.5m depth.
TNG shares ended 0.5c lower at 13.5c.
So, encouraging news for TNG, as well as highlighting the sense of proper long-term storage of drill core. What might have been passed up by one generation of explorers -- albeit the BMR in this case -- can be of real importance to the next.