So, I had a look at the reports and from the presented numbers, it would seem there has been a change to how the mine operates. They are now mining only the high-grade resource, which is nice, but the amount of wet tonnes is miniscule. Most importantly, the costs per ton are
Production (wet tonnes
@grade):
- June Qtr 53.5t @24g/t;
- Sept Qtr 16.8t @115g/t;
- Dec Qtr 22.9t @164g/t.
Mining costs (only production + admin):
- June Qtr: 300,000K (92,000K + 208,000K),
5,570K/t;
- Sept Qtr: 330,000K (105,000K + 225,000K),
19,640K/t;
- Dec Qtr: 652,000K (226,000K + 426,000K),
28,470K/t.
This is a huge increase in operation expenses and whilst I am happy to see that they produced over 3.7kgs of gold, they generate only 36,000K of oper. cash flow. That is 297K ($117AUD) per ounce of gold they sold. What is that, a 5% margin?!?
I wonder what is happening on the site? Are they collecting rocks from the selected areas with tweezers to make up the costs/grade/volume/time ratio or is there some sort of outsourcing going on there? Does anyone have a clue?
Cheers,
MiB
