Which IO Co is best positioned to recover?, page-27

Its worth downloading and spending 1/2 hour reading the BHP WAIO presentation, then the answer becomes fairly clear which junior is "best positioned to recover". If BHP is going to increase production at the same grade, juniors will get pushed further out of the market on both grade and production costs, and the better question is "which will survive". BHP are talking about oversupply in the short and medium term, and guessing their horizon for medium term is at least 5 years maybe up to 10. The juniors' niche market isn't based on grade, metallurgical characterisitics, costs, customer sophistication, or value-in-use. None of this provides a competitive base in an over-supplied market.

There's going to be some consolidation amongst the juniors, but their problem is they've made very high cost script acquisitions during the boom (for AGO = Giralia, FerrAus, Warwick, Aurox) which all need to be written off for realistic values to be established. I don't think the AGO board would accept an offer of 40 cents from MGX, and I doubt MGX would offer 60 cents. And looking at Atlas's tenement portolio this morning, there's a lot of ground they seem to be keeping which isn't delivering much (not even exploration results).

As for majors taking out a few juniors - why ? BHP can expand to 290mtpa without significant fixed infrastructure development. RIO are at 333mtpa. If oversupply continues for 1 or 2 years all the juniors will be gone, with tenements going cheap from the Receivers. There's no rush when you've got 23 billion tonnes @ 59.3% Fe and an exploration target of another 24 billion @ 56 - 60% Fe.