roadshow preso with phil thick

I hold a fairly large parcel of MHM &, like the rest of you, have been a bit shocked, by recent events & disclosures that have come out of the company. In the light of the current company roadshow around the capitals I asked & was allowed to attend a presentation today given by Phil Thick to a Sydney broking firm where I have an account.

The meeting was not a formal presentation as such but a question & answer session with the brokers & analysts, who were already familiar with the story, asking Phil questions & him giving answers & background.

As such there is a strict limit on what I can say.

Obviously my objective in attending was to meet Phil & decide whether he & the company were worth my continued support. Can I say that I found Phil Thick to be an honest, down to earth, no nonsense individual who has the talent & smarts to do the job. His answers to all questions were forthright & b/s free. His appraisal on where the company had gone wrong & what he needs to do to get it where we all want it to be was forthright & pulled no punches.

He sees the main objective in the short term to be resolving the US funding issue which he wants finalised before year end to start the 1 year construction in Jan 2013. And make no mistake it is the US plant(s) that is the goal for this company. It is where the tonnages lie to make this company very good money.

As already announced the precursor to the funding issue is the demonstration of the Geelong plant producing at a sufficient & consistent rate to prove & underline the throughput of the US plant. Phil sees a consistent 600-800 tons per week for a couple of months as an acceptable rate for this.

Geelong was, & always will be, a retrofit using a lot of old & used equipment together with our new technology & add-ons. The premise is too small & has the wrong layout for our process stream. When this is put under pressure failures start to appear. That is what is happening at Geelong under a 24 hour operation scenario.

Kentucky will be purpose built with new equipment & a complete production line methodology encompassing MHM’s technology from the start which will overcome a lot of the Geelong issues. That does not mean there will not be issues & teething problems but they will be a lot more manageable that at Geelong.

As stated previously the US operation will start with a 125k ton plant which Phil is confident will be filled to capacity from day 1. He is also confident of the US figures based on a combination of toll to process &, retain & sell the output, scenario. One snippet I did pick up is that by far the major operating cost is labour.

I can say that after meeting Phil my confidence is restored that MHM is now back under control & heading in the right direction. We now have a no nonsense independent Managing Director / CEO giving us leadership & no b/s information.

There are still issues to be addressed including more independence & experience on the board but while not everything has been fixed this is a very good start.

By the way I have bounced this off Phil & he is happy for me to post it.