Investor Chronicle comments (stolen from Timber Trade on LSE)

[leslieby101]

https://www.investorschronicle.co.uk/co ... 803a43d615

Investors have started to recognise this company’s value but its work in the coming months should push its share price even higher.

Greatland Gold's half-year earnings statement reveals the rapid transformation of the miner between June and December 2024. Its closing cash position rose from £4.8mn to £71.9mn, debt fell to zero and net assets on the balance sheet climbed from £41mn to over £490mn.

That’s what you get when a company goes from owning a 30 per cent stake in a mine development and a few desert-hardened vehicles to running Australia’s third-largest gold plant.

This transformation has come about through the equity-funded buyout of Newmont’s (US:NEM) Telfer mine and its stake in the Havieron project down the road. These two Western Australian operations will probably vault Greatland up the league table in terms of gold production.

Production at Havieron is expected to be around 221,000 ounces (oz) a year, although things aren’t due to kick off until production at Telfer has ended.

If Telfer’s life is extended beyond the current 12 months, however, the company could see production of well over 500,000 oz a year. Havieron, which Greatland discovered in 2018 and then partnered with former Telfer owner Newcrest to develop, could also grow in size compared with the most recent study. Greatland expects to finish a new feasibility study by the end of the year.

Investors have already bid up Greatland in anticipation of changes to the initial forecasts from when the deal was announced in September. Even after issuing £255mn in new shares and doubling the share count in December, the price is beyond where it was pre-deal. The market value has not yet eclipsed the £1.4bn high set in early 2021, however. Additionally, gold-hungry Australian investors will arrive in a few months’ time as the company adds an ASX listing.....

....Newmont did not publish a reserve for Telfer but its most recent resource estimate, from the end of 2023, was around 590,000 oz, at a grade of 0.67 grammes per tonne. This was calculated using a gold price of $1,600 an oz, compared with the current spot price of over $2,900 an oz.

Using a higher gold price would be likely to increase the resource as it brings in lower-grade material that would not have been mined profitably at lower prices. “That alone is an indication that there’s a lot more material that can come economically into the mine plan,” Greatland chief executive Shaun Day told Investors’ Chronicle earlier this year.

The company will update the resource estimate by the end of this month....