It was back to usual programming on a fairly flat week for the ASX.
The markets showed some mid-week lustre, boosted by United States-European Union trade talks and a New York court order suspending US President Trump’s Liberation Day trade tariffs.
But the optimism quickly waned as America’s Federal Court restored the tariffs the next day. Weak falling home sales data, rising jobless numbers and more tariff uncertainty saw volatility creep back in at the end the week.
Safe-haven gold still held a handy $5150 an ounce price to end the week and the US Fed is expected to cut rates sooner rather than later, thanks to economic distress and bond yields tumbling.
In positive news, the Australian energy sector surged more than 2 per cent buoyed by the federal government’s approval of Woodside Energy’s North West Shelf gas project - despite oil prices dropping. This long-awaited green light, following six years of deliberation, will extend the life of Australia’s largest oil and gas project to 2070, offering a lifeline to the nation’s energy sector and providing a stable transition baseload power supply to meet its net zero ambitions.
Bulls N’ Bears' ASX Runners of the Week list was unconventionally littered with a group of revenue-making companies this week, as a mix of sales figures, exclusive deals, and acquisitions lit up the boards. The final Runner for the week was reserved for one of Bulls N’ Bears’ favourites, market darling Dateline Resources, which traded an astonishing 2.85 billion shares this month, equating to its entire register’s worth.
EDEN INNOVATIONS (ASX: EDE)
up 333% (0.15c – 0.5c)
This week’s Bulls N’ Bears ASX Runner of the Week is clean tech trailblazer Eden Innovations, which sent its share price soaring on Thursday after announcing a cracking $878,000 in EdenCrete additive sales from February 6 to May 23. The company’s April and May sales alone rocketed 86 per cent higher than for the entire December quarter last year.
The company’s shares bounced back from a lowly 0.15c per share close last week to trade at 0.5c per share on Friday, up 333 per cent, on nearly $1 million of paper traded across two days.
Eden’s star carbon nanotube-enriched concrete additive, EdenCrete, is shaking up the increasingly green concrete industry by boosting batch strength while slashing the need for carbon-heavy ordinary Portland cement.
A major win came with a $141,000 order from Holcim US for a 22-storey high-rise in Denver, which is Eden’s first big-ticket commercial project.
The market lapped it up, with shares surging on Eden’s green concrete breakthrough into high-rise buildings, one of the biggest addressable markets.
Meanwhile, Eden’s OptiBlend dual-fuel kit, which lets diesel generators run cleaner on natural gas, continues to hum in the background, fuelling company sales across the US and India.
With concrete giants such as Holcim jumping on board and sales breaking into the mammoth high-rise building industry, Eden looks poised to cement its place as a clean tech leader. If its momentum holds, the company could go from market battler to skyscraper-high regular in quick succession.
FOCUS MINERALS (ASX: FML)
up 161% (23c – 60c)
Bulls N’ Bears’ silver medallist this week is Western Australian gold miner Focus Minerals, which shot up like a prospector’s pickaxe on Tuesday thanks to a juicy $250M cash deal to offload its Laverton gold project to $5 billion market darling Genesis Minerals.
Punters were left scrambling to pick up shares in the cashed-up gold miner on Monday, with a whopping $5.2M traded to push the company’s shares up 161 per cent to 60c per share.
Nestled in WA’s prolific Leonora-Laverton district, the Laverton project is a stone’s throw from Genesis’ massive 3-million-tonne per annum Laverton mill.
The acquisition looks like a perfect fit for Genisis and is set to churn out ample tonnages of open pit and underground gold ore for the company’s hungry mill.
The deal contains no pesky conditions precedent and is set to seal in early June, handing Focus a mountainous $250M in cash, which looks very timely considering the company is lugging around $187M in debt.
Focus will retain its producing Coolgardie gold project, where it cracked a record mining output in the past quarter. Its Three Mile Hill mill processed a thumping 370,262 tonnes for a handy 5376 ounces of gold at $4388 per ounce.
With its Bonnie Vale underground mine ahead of schedule and its Alicia open pit firing up, Focus could be hitting its straps in no time, as it looks to increase its lower-grade gold ore with higher-grade output from the newer mines.
Laverton’s synergistic sale sent Focus’ shares flying as investors bet on the company’s cash windfall to turn its luck around in a red-hot gold price environment. With Coolgardie’s Bonnie Vale underground cranking out ore and a new 80-room camp to house its growing crew, Focus is sitting pretty to join the mid-cap success stories of WA’s gold sector – aided by its newfound financial flexibility.
INFOCUS GROUP HOLDINGS (ASX: IFG)
up 140% (0.5c – 1.2c)
Taking out the final podium spot on Runners of the Week is digital solutions experts InFocus Group, which shot out of a cannon on Tuesday by unveiling a blockbuster US$3.25M (A$5M) deal to become the exclusive tech partner for Taiwanese gaming guru TG Solutions Consulting.
A feeding frenzy ensued with the company’s share price rocketing 140 per cent to 1.2c per share on a sizzling $1.2M in stock traded. This was nearly as much as the entire company’s preannouncement market valuation of $1.3M.
InFocus says it is set to build a cutting-edge iGaming platform for TG’s white-label distribution. It promises to be packed with bells and whistles, such as a polymarket-inspired dynamic odds system, digital collectibles, tokenised loyalty programs and crypto payments.
The contract includes milestone-based payments and locks in InFocus as TG’s go-to tech partner for all future rollouts. The company says it’s a growing market trend as predictive gaming evolves thanks to big data, analytics and cybersecurity expenditure.
Investors would seem to agree, betting big on InFocus’s pivot into the red-hot iGaming sector. With trials wrapping up and the platform set to launch within two years, the company looks well-positioned at the forefront of a digital gaming revolution that might return the market minnow to its former glory.
The historic open pit at Dateline Resources’ Colosseum gold project in California, where the company uncovered potential gold extensions at surface earlier this week. Credit: File.
DATELINE RESOURCES (ASX: DTR)
up 86% (5.5c – 10.25c)
Finally, Dateline Resources has hit the Runners list for the third time in almost as many weeks. Attempting its best ‘broken record’ impersonation and continuing to break its share price highs, the US-based junior goldie’s share price has risen an eye-watering 1950 per cent this quarter and shows no signs of slowing down.
The company’s shares peaked on Friday at 10.25c, up 86 per cent over the week, on a monumental $80M in shares traded.
Following Trump’s Truth Social championing of the company’s “rare earths mine” earlier this month, Dateline continued its breakout on Tuesday when it told the market its Colosseum project in California could be sitting on a much larger gold system than previously realised.
A recent rock chip program picked up several outcropping felsite dykes up 1 kilometre west and 4km southwest of the existing pit, which appear to follow a deliberate geological trend.
Adding fuel to the fire, results of a fresh surface geochemical survey now point to concealed breccia pipes lurking just beyond the rim of the mine’s historic pits.
The company says the new mineralisation lines up like clockwork with its known structural gold system and could point to a string of satellite intrusions which, if confirmed, could unearth even more gold-rich breccia pipes brewing just below the surface.
The latest rock samples lit up with classic pathfinder elements such as antimony, bismuth and tellurium, which are textbook signs of an intrusion-related gold system. These IRGS-style systems are known for their layered structure, with lighter elements floating near the surface and the real prize - gold - tending to settle deeper.
Armed with a fresh trail of geological breadcrumbs, Dateline is ramping up for its next big move. More surface sampling is underway, and the company is locking in its first drilling campaign beyond the pit walls. The program will chase the projected path of the newly mapped felsite dykes and test if the Colosseum’s breccia pipes are just the tip of a much bigger, vertically stacked golden iceberg.
If the upcoming drill campaign strikes more gold, it could blow the doors open on Dateline’s already impressive 1.1-million-ounce resource and unlock a whole new chapter of potential at Colosseum.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
By Andrew Todd
