Ok, I had a good chat with Ross and Jamie. It was particularly good to be able to extend my congratulation to Jamie on his new appointment, which, is well deserved. He has done years of heavy lifting and continues to do so.
I did ask Jamie a couple years back why he didn’t hold shares and one of the reasons was there might have been a perception that picking up shares at 25c or less might be a little distasteful considering what happened to the company. Please, bear in mind Ross could have cleaned up during this time. He chose not to.
Broadly for me, I wanted a rough road map into the future, and I was happy with the direction.
1)Get back to mining. We have everything we need to start, reagents included.
They will start-up once they get the go ahead.
2)Funding for plant 1 will come from either:
A Thai bank or banks
Taurus, if they propose a good deal
Sale of NE
Partly from the sale of Gold from Plant 2
Capital raise (This has a less than 1% chance of happening)
3)Continue to progress the sale of NE to concentrate on our core asset.
4)Hopefully get some higher grades. This mine is extremely sensitive to grade increase and will simultaneously increasing our ounces produces and decreasing out AISC.
Initially the stockpile has costs associated that have already been spent, conversely, the initial start to the quartz lease will be cutting and produces no revenue. I / We / shareholders and management hope there will be some higher grades in the stockpile as activity on site was rushed prior to closure so this is possible and might be a small windfall.
Also, we might be pleasantly surprised by some of the grades from the quartz lease.
5)A rough profit per ounce of AUD $1,000 which is potentially tax free for the next 8 years.
6)Regarding tax – Australia and Thailand have a tax treaty and so, we pay tax in Thailand. Again, we might not have to. This means that we have not paid tax in Australia and so any dividend will not be franked. For me this means a share buyback (depending on the price of the share) is the most efficient way to return capital to shareholder.
On this point, if the company buy back 0.5% of the company. You as a shareholder could liquidate 0.5% of your holding and retain the same percentage of the company. This is your dividend and it’s taxed at half if you have held for over a year.
What I have done is consider this investment, where we are and where we are going.
Once we are back mining and close to being debt free. We will be making call it 120,000 ounces at $1,000 for $130,000,000 “post tax” profit or roughly $0,59 per share. If we are somehow not a $3 per share, then we can purchase a cool 32,500,000 shares as a buy back, just in our tax year!!!
Today, I increased my holding of the company
Game, Set and Match.
(20min delay)