its not all about copper in botswana

MOD is a double barrelled play that may be a little undervalued. The two plays are

1. Copper in Botswana, sandwiched between Hana and Discovery Metals (two $600m market cap companies)

2. Gold in NZ.

I wasn't so sure on the Gold in NZ angle so I did a bit of digging on it and now think that this part of the MOD story is being overlooked a little by the market.

MOD have negotiated an 80% JV interest in Sam's Creek, which is currently a 700,000oz resource that was proved up by Oceana. Why did Oceana JV it out? Because the permits were going to expire and they were too busy with their Didipio project in the Phillipines and their Reefton and Macraes mines.

Amazingly, according to the quarterly, within two weeks of securing the JV, MOD have started a diamond drilling program and are drilling now. Not sure if you could pull that speed off in Aussie.

So they have plenty of gold and plenty of exploration upside and are in the midst of that right now.

My concerns were about the conservationists and getting the deposit into production.

Sams Creek is in the Golden Bay area, so-named because of the gold discovered there in the 1850's

When the Kahurangi National Park was gazetted a number of years ago , the area that covers Sam's Creek and the exploration zone thereto was specifically excluded so that is could be explored for Gold.

NZ is pretty Green but the PM John Key is pushing an expansion of the mining industry to help NZ'ers increase their living standard and economy.

Mr Miles Kennedy, our Chairman, should be the man to secure a mining permit for Sam's Creek as out of the three major operating gold mines in NZ he got the permits for two of them, Reefton and Macreas. Miles bought these two off BHP and CRA who thought NZ would be too hard, but he got them into operation and MacReas has been operating for 20 years and produced over 3million Oz of gold.

NZ has a decent gold mining business with the three major operating mines producing most of NZ's 432,000oz of gold in 2009.

Anyway, who knows how it will develop but it sure looks like NZ is more pro-mining than I thought and the NZ Gold operation will be kicking in sooner rather than later