not alot of whippy!!, page-30

Vautex, you my have seen the Brian Gilbertson interview on Lateline business last night bu thought would attach the text for further disection.

BRIAN GILBERTSON: Well we have long been evangelists for the concept of the Steel Feed Corporation, which is a company that mines and supplies the raw materials needed to make steel. In other words, iron ore, manganese and coking coal. Now we don't have coking coal.

The manganese project is the one we're talking about here. Jupiter has been focused for some time under its chairman Jeff Wedlock on trying to develop the iron ore potential in the Yilgarn area, where happily you don't have to build a port and you don't have to build a railway line.

That, you will know, iron ore is in large measure an infrastructure challenge, and infrastructure is very expensive.

But in the Yilgarn those two key things already exist. And so the whole Jupiter strategy has been focused on trying to make use of that infrastructure that's already there to expand the existing iron ore business in that area.

WHITNEY FITZSIMMONS: But manganese is used in high-end steel productions, so what is the aspiration for the company? Will it be seen to be a junior mining company or a mid-tier company? What's your thought on that?





BRIAN GILBERTSON: Oh, well, no. I mean, if we can deliver the two projects to which we have referred already, which is the Tippy manganese project and then the Yilgarn iron ore strategy, we would be very happy, because we would have built two projects which have enormous potential.

And I think our shareholders would be very happy if that' were successfully delivered, which I expect it will be.

And I was just slightly nervous you were referring dismissively there to manganese. Manganese is absolutely essential to making steel.

You can't make steel without manganese, or at least you can't do it effectively. And so if you see any growth in - over the next decade, centuries in steelmaking, in economic growth anywhere, you're going to have to have manganese.

WHITNEY FITZSIMMONS: But Brian Gilbertson, iron ore is very competitive. We saw the difficulties that Fortescue saw in its attempts in that area, and particularly given the Rio and BHP Billiton deal, how do you rate your chances?

BRIAN GILBERTSON: You know, I have to make it clear the perfectly obvious thing that we are not in that kind of league. We are not out there trying to build something in the Pilbara.

Pilbara is big capital expenditure, of course the oil reserves are bigger and more uniform. But you need to build the infrastructure.

And that I think is beyond the ambitions of Jupiter and of Pallinghurst. However, in the Yilgarn you have the unique situation where there is an existing railway line and an existing port and it is taking iron ore at the moment, and by increasing the through-put of iron ore, everyone benefits because you put more tonnages through a fixed cost structure, the unit costs come down.

Cheers Gldy