I just did a quick calculation from the last 4 quarterlies.There...

I just did a quick calculation from the last 4 quarterlies.

There were 7,684 oz produced and the development costs totalled $7.396 mill .. so the Development costs /oz of production were about $960/oz.

Add the production costs ($4.95 mill) which equate to $644/oz and we already have the gold price covered before even looking at the ..
Admin costs of $3.539 mill, equating to $460/oz and the
Exploration&evaluation costs of $2.41 mill or about $314/oz.

Interest and Other costs of Financing comes to about $100/oz.

Then there are equipment costs which I haven't looked at.

There is also the Depreciation and Amortisation costs which were just over $2 mill /annum last annual report.. so let's say about $250/oz.

I'm trying to paint CTO in as much positive light as possible.
but my biggest concern that remains is the Development cost as I wouldn't expect it to come down by a significant amount even with production ramping up as you always would need to tunnel a certain distance to get to and access the next gold pod which is almost always going to be a constant and so where does scale help in bringing down this Development Cost ? .. I don't think scale helps - plus let's not forget we're progressively getting deeper underground.

So anyway if you add up all the above costs the cost per oz are currently running at $2,730/oz.

So even allowing for the fact that some of these costs will come down considerably with scale (if it eventually scales up to 20,000 oz/quarter and beyond let's say) the production and Development costs alone I'd expect would still be hovering over the $1,200/oz mark.
Adding all the other costs should still make this a marginal mine at best even at 300,000 oz/annum.
(Assuming that this production rate is attainable).

The company needs to clarify a lot of things and make some projections and may even need to go into a care and maintenance phase .. as it's currently costing over a $1,000/oz more to produce each oz of its gold.
So what is the point of producing right now ?

Even if we're banking on the gold price going up in the future - so too you'd assume will the labour costs, the energy costs etc, plus our dollar would also rise .., which could offset all this.

So I'm exercising extreme caution and staying clear of this until the company clarifies things, if it ever does.