@TheLegend27 I am more than happy to clarify my talking points and answer your questions. So...
1. Spending Millions on Purchasing Leases
IMO junior explorers with limited capital shouldn't be spending millions purchasing leases. They should have the expertise in-house to identify prospective ground and peg it. This costs a fraction of the price of buying leases from outside parties and is more in line with shareholder expectations.
To give you an example EMU spent $1.2 million of shareholder funds to buy the Badja gold project back in 2020. It's a small, high-grade gold deposit, which you would expect (for that sort of money) might produce some memorable results. Has it? Not that I can recall.
Then there are the copper, nickel and REE projects that they have acquired and spruiked as the next big thing (yes, I understand that this is all part of being listed) but they regularly announced work programs and either didn't announce the results or the results failed to fire the market's imagination.
The Georgetown project in Queensland is just a continuation of the same pattern of behavior - the company paid $50K to enter into an earn-in agreement on the project spending $200K in 2023 and a further $250K this year but even at this point they won't own anything. It is not until the end of 2025, when after spending another $300K on exploration (plus all the rents, rates, etc) that they will have earned a 50% holding. Now that may not sound like a lot but remember that right now the company likely has less than $200K in the bank and it costs them ~$130K a month just to keep the doors open. Where is the money coming from to fund this foray into the tropics?
In short, they've been trying to buy results and failing miserably!
2. Staff & Admin Costs
IMO, at over $1 million per annum, you'd be trying to trim these costs to the bone. Does a supposed junior explorer really need 4 directors, a CEO, and a CFO, as well as an office in West Perth? You tell me.
3. Capital Structure
Well, to give you an example, I've been investing in the resources sector for 40-odd years and I have never seen anything like the 'reward' that EMU gifted shareholders in the form of its rights issue in February 2023. On the day the rights issue was announced EMU was trading at around 3.5c but the board decided to do a 1 for 1 rights issue at 2c - a more than 40% discount to market.
I've participated in raisings at 5, 10, 15, and even 20% discounts to market but 40+%? Never!
The effect this had was to double the shares on issue, taking the capital structure from a still manageable <700 million shares to nearly 1.5 billion!
Did they need the money? No doubt. Did they need to raise it at such a discount? Not IMO. Why did they do it? You would need to ask them.
4. The Consolidation
I am pretty brutal on consolidations because my experience shows that companies that undertake consolidations more often than not end up right back where they started in a relatively short time frame, further eroding shareholder value and torching a whole new group of investors. Brace yourselves, it might happen to you!
As I have commented elsewhere, if a stock has fallen to a pretty much untradable 0.1c, it should be allowed to die. IMO if the market deems the stock to have essentially no value, why let it trade? Shareholders should write it off as a bad experience whilst the directors and management should face questions on their ability and competency to run a public company.
What's the wash-up? IMO these guys haven't done a good job, over an extended time frame, and they show NO signs of changing their ways. It's high time they joined the "50% of explorers are de-listed or taken over after 10 years because they don't make a discovery" that
@TheLegend27 mentioned in the comment above.
PS. My opinion, not advice and make sure you DYOR.
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