rewards at hand, page-3

Goodone - was the article about Australian gold miners operating in Australia or overseas or both ?

The two can be oceans apart in terms of energy and labour costs, tax , royalties etc.. I largely ignore most articles from "popular" newspapers and publications in regards to gold and gold mining . Have seen far too many inaccuracies , wrong guesses and just plain old BS, for me to take them seriously any more.

Articles from highgrade.net are fairly good and dig a little deeper if your interested, they have a free trial and a great archive of old (but still interesting ) articles.

But yes , gold miners (and all miners for that matter) are finding it increasingly difficult to operate in this country. Gold miners are especially very cost sensitive. Gundga has posted before about the difficulty operating here , even just to get approvals to start exploration (can take years!)Then , good luck getting a mine into production in a timely manner if your lucky to find something in the brown feilds of australia. Tropicana the last significant gold find here , and how long ago was that now ??

Its no accident that the real "talent" in Australian mineral exploration are focused abroad these days, especially in west africa .

Low hanging , easy to mine fruit in west africa (more specifically Burkina) is the way to go for the foreseeable future. Especially for gold miners , that can go after lower costs ,size, scale, shallown open pit operations that can to yeild from the get go once into production.

Compared to some project over in Australia's "deeps" where you have to clear 100m of cover before you hit the ore body. No thanks....Once again, a good reason why the real talent is focused on countries like BF.

And the market WILL focus on the lucrative nature of West africa once again, just like in 2009/10. The likely catalyst ? an increase in m&a activity in the region imo. The action could really heat up this year with so many co's rapidly moving through FS stages of development. Suitors may swoop in before juniors advance on mine build .The big boys like to build mines their way, and would approach it in a more aggressive way than a junior than has to borrow or raise cash to build and likely would start smaller intially (this is a likely direction for AMX if they decide to mine imo)

Lets just hope amx isn't one of the first to get plucked over there. Would be a shame, but I think management have proven they won't bend over for a raw deal.

End of 2013 , we could be looking at a much different landscape over in the West africa gold space. Just need to throw a little fuel on this fire and it'll go off .