moribund as usual, page-3

Agreed but ALD have a lot of runs to make on the board. Hopefully with the dry season ahead of us they will not be able to blame rain, but I guess they can always get a breakdown, the staff to go on strike or have troubles with landowners/politic. Latter are problem anyone has in a third world environment. Will be interested to see if they can get into new deposit at Gold Ridge to get their recoveries and grade up a bit - this would make the world of difference to production. At Simberi (if there is no breakdown) the challenge is to keep costs down using the Sorarwa ores (with the aerial conveyor) and keeping transport costs down (the ore is not good grades but there's lots of it).

As I understand it during the wet season (just over) they use ore which has been pushed by a dozer to the edge of the deposit (it too boggy to go into the deposit in the wet) and the task now (that the dry season is approaching) will be to get back into the deposit to make things ready for the next wet season. Consequently work (and costs) will be incurred now which will not feed returns until the ore is processed at the end of the year (the next wet season). Hopefully we should see costs drop for this quarter but that has to be sustained during this (and next) quarter when we are expending money on ore which will not yield a return until later in the year. Hopefully by then the throughput of the plant will increase (that's where a lot of investment is going now) thus getting unit costs down.