i think there was some speculation about it being rated in...

i think there was some speculation about it being rated in dollars rather than cents, but i am still asking also, when will coverage occur.

This from the Australian.

CRITERION went back to his textbook yesterday and looked up the bit that said D for diversification. It didn't do much good, but it did help him find M for Minemakers, a would-be miner that is about as diversified as you can get.

Not only that, its share price has been a bolter in the past week and may be one to hold up over time.

Its big thing is rock phosphate, the stuff that becomes fertiliser on the garden and on food crops. As chief executive Andrew Drummond said yesterday, markets may crash but we've still got to eat and produce crops.

It may have escaped your notice but there's a new cartel in the world for rock phosphate. Treat it with various acids and it becomes superphosphate, which agricultural producers must have, so much so that the price has quadrupled in a year.

Minemakers has a feasibility study under way on its Wonorah deposit near Tennant Creek, which holds the country's largest undeveloped phosphate resource. It has been drilled previously by Rio (up to 2002 when phosphate was 20 per cent of today's price). If all proves well the rock could be trucked to the central Australian railway line and shipped out through Darwin to Chinese customers.

Besides the in-flavour phosphate asset, Minemakers also owns Australia's largest fluorspar deposit (formerly Comalco-owned) in Tasmania, and recently began uranium exploration in Tasmania, which may be Australia's second-friendliest uranium state after South Australia.

Minemakers has drilled several old uranium prospects in the northeast of the island state. Before it could do so, it had to overcome opposition from the Tasmanian Greens Party, which landed a no-exploration-or-mining bill in Parliament.

The bill it didn't get up, as the government and opposition teamed up to make sure Tassie did not miss out on the uranium exploration boom.

Minemakers also has the old Rossarden tin and tungsten deposits in Tasmania's northeast among its key properties. Drummond knows a good uranium prospect when he sees one, having worked in the 1970s and 1980s with the likes of Uranerz, and he sees Rossarden for its uranium potential rather than its historic tin and tungsten deposits.

The brokers have yet to work out what Minemakers might be worth, but some back of the envelope calculations suggest it should be valued in dollars rather than cents.

Criterion ranks it a speculative buy.