Your cover has been blown mate, time to give it up. Equity...

Your cover has been blown mate, time to give it up.

Equity raisings also have benefits as they derisk failure. You don’t as easily end up in the hands of receivers and managers. They also reduce the debt payback time and interest that must be paid on loans. The biggest risk for development projects is that they never get funded at all, by any method. That doesn’t sound likely in the case of WAF who are short listing 14 tier-1 funders.

Some people make it sound like it’s impossible to find, finance and build a mine and make money from it on the share market. That dilution will kill shareholders off every time. If this was the case why would anyone ever invest in an explorer/developer? Answer: because some are winners which will give outstanding rates of return once in operation.

I was just re-reading the June 2018 feasibilty study and the after tax payback at US$1,200/oz (and a 5% discount rate) is 1.5 years (1.33 years at US$1,300/oz).

The payback rates are calculated on US$185.3 million of preproduction CapEx, inclusive of all open-pit and underground pre- production mining & development costs, contingencies, duties & taxes.

If this amount is reduced by a A$70 million equity raising the payback period will be even shorter.

Debt paid back in just over a year, more drilling could easily fill the backend of the mine plan out for say another 3 years. That’s at least 7 years of +200kozs of gold production at an AISC of US$600-640/oz. At the current gold price of US$1,230/oz that’s a margin of US$590-$630/oz. Over 7 years that’s undiscounted cash flow of between US$826 million and US$882 million.