im here olly and still holding - albeit with some bloody...

im here olly and still holding - albeit with some bloody hands.

Time and personal reasons prevent me from regular posting. I have been through the region again of late and amazed at the carnage for the miners.

rightly or wrongly Tiger seems confident they will proceed as planned for production next year Q2/Q3. HMS plant fabrication is under way and finance already secured (pre - crisis). There is a fair amount of smoke being blown up a fair amount of arses in Africa at the moment so - please take the above with due diligence. seems they can produce under 4kpt so....so far so good.

The real problem for all miners is finance and concentrate sales at the gate - which have dried up. It technical and I dont have the wherewhithal to explain intricies of copper trading in the DRC right now except to say moving unprocessed concentrate is not the market it was (and hence Anvil calamitious demise). This is what tiger are selling into - albeit that things will certainly stabilise by the time they start bagging.

There is so much going on that who can say where the cards will fall. In Zambia near the DRC border the Chinese are nearing completion of the the mother ship of smelters. The primary feed sources is EQNs lumwana mine projected at 176k of contained cu in concentrat pa - just one problem...EQN might not be able to turn the electricity on in Jan as they are trying to apply a butt plug (penalaties for over contract dispute) to the state electricity supplier, who not surprisingly has give them a bird and will turn off the juice. Lets see who kisses whose arse then. The upshot is that its not good to have a new smelter with nothing to process so they may look north for supply (not withstanding the embargoe against non benifacted ore). This puts AVM and TGS in good stead.

As for FQM they just scaled out their operations re smelting/processing. Not entirely sure if this economic decision or political - but suspect political as they are trying to dodge the new windfall tax on copper. Nothing makes local politics jump like a solid round of layoffs.

keep tgs safe. Trouble times ahead - but things trundling along. Apparantly Macq still have multi dollar expectations.

good luck to holders