Yes - I nearly fell off my chair several months ago when I saw the Fish River Fault Long Section and the potential amount of metal contained within. This has the potential to be one of the largest base metal discoveries since Century and HYC in the 1980s and 1990s. Only drilling will eventually give us the answer as to whether AML have a Zambian style copper belt ore body or more of a traditional Mississippi Valley Type orebody (or perhaps a sort or variant or mixture of the two types).
Although there have been some mis-steps on the way the AML guys are progressing in their knowledge of the orebody and once more drill rigs start it will reach the point where it will become difficult to hide exactly how big this find could potentially be from the market.
This ticks all of my boxes, a relatively stable jurisdiction (not the DRC), open pitable depths (unlike Admiral Bay), a polymetallic deposit with Cu Zn and accessory Pb and Co and a reasonably high grade deposit with a huge tonnage and hence long mine life to cover the cost of construction and development and stay open through multiple low and high metal price cycles.
The sheer size and scale of it is also the biggest risk because these types of orebodies can sometimes get stuck in an endless loop of drilling, finding more ore, evaluation, resource modelling, then numerous different feasibility studies which all sometimes result in a sort of corporate paralysis or "death by feasibility study". It's usually at this stage that the project gets sold or the company gets taken over at the bottom of the metal price cycle by a more canny predator. So being sold for a song is a real risk for shareholders and management.
I agree that logistically it would have been better to leverage off the sale of the existing Century Mine infrastructure.
I disagree with some of the aspersions cast on Hamish Collins, he is a smart operator whom has made a lot of money and managed a lot of different mining operations from coal to base and precious metals, in the industry he is not known for being a dummy, dummies don't last long in this industry, they tend to get found out rather quickly.
This is a long term accumulate and hold story for me but with a lot of drilling planned for this year don't rule out a PEX style share-price explosion/re-rate share price event like we saw over at PEX recently if they do hit something extraordinary.
AML Price at posting:
24.0¢ Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
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