the cold hard facts, page-10

Nooks, you're quite right. There's debt in the equation too. From last Quarterly:

* Debt as of 30 April 2012 was AUD 65.1 million (including the deferred settlement with construction contractor).
This was offset by about $19M in cash and investment holdings.

Plough, you mentioned getting a higher profit estimate. There's so many variables, I'm not surprised. For example, I used the total global resource at 0.80% Cu. We could use the in-situ indicated resource, 20.5 Mt at 0.87% Cu. Adds almost 10% in revenue, which is a big jump in profit. Being at the end of ramp-up, and with the company surfing on the edge of moving into profit, any changes to the figures either way makes a big difference.

But there was another detail in the last Quarterly that worried me. On p4:

* Ore inventory adjustment (114) [US cents/lb] for Long term stockpiles of Oxide, Transition and Lower grade Primary Sulphide ore.

The June Ops/Explor'n update gave Cu contained metal produced for the April quarter as 2681 tonnes. So the above low-grade ore stockpiling is accounted for as a credit (cost offset for production) in the April quarter of:
2681 x 2200 x US$1.14 = US$6.7 Million.

Then in June, some of this stock-piled ore was used after the heavy rain to run the company at .... probably a small loss for the month? So was this stock-piled ore really the same as money in the bank? According to the June update, the company replaced the stockpiled ore used during June. So it will be interesting to see how these figures appear in the accounting for the next quarter.

The above US$6.7 Million is a big number in terms of working out whether HGO is running at a profit.

There's so much going on with the company just now. I'm waiting on the figures for the next quarter before making another call on this one.