Irish rock band Thin Lizzy is long-remembered for its chart-topping hit, “The Boys Are Back in Town” – a 1976 recording that shot to No.1 in Ireland and charted with respectable Top 10 peaks in the United Kingdom and Canada, in addition to reaching No.12 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States.
Heck, it was even voted by Rolling Stone magazine as the 272nd best song in its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list in 2021.
And the legendary tune’s theme was ringing through the ASX this week, with all of the small mining companies featuring in Bulls N’ Bears Runners of The Week showing the sector was truly “back in town” through stunning share price gains that put all other divisions in the shade. It was the first time in months that all four Runners came from the “drill-and-dig” brigade, possibly indicating a return to favour for those who love to get their hands dirty in the mining world.
Anyway, this week’s main nod goes to Killi Resources, who killed it with a massive 262.5 per cent jump from 4c to touch a high of 14.5c after assays from a suite of rock chips pointed to a new epithermal gold system at the company’s Kaa prospect. The shares took off like a scalded cat when the market opened after it revealed gold grading up to a whopping 238 grams per tonne and 5.4 per cent copper from the rock chips – believed to represent the surface outcrop of a mineralised structure.
The company has been listed for more than two years and has never seen trading volumes like these, with 56.1 million changing hands on Tuesday and another 46.6 million swapped on Wednesday as it reached its 14.5c peak.
Further rock-chip results include a stellar sample going 14.3g/t gold, 2.2 per cent copper with 907g/t silver, while another went a solid 6.06g/t gold, 1.5 per cent copper and 585g/t silver. Management says the rock chips collected from the program were taken from outcrops along a ridge about 200m wide and the results extend the mineralisation, which remains open along strike, for 1.8km.
Kaa sits within Killi’s 100 per-cent owned Mt Rawdon West operation, about 75km south-west from Bundaberg in Queensland.
The company’s immediate plans are for exploration field programs that include surface mapping and an induced-polarisation (IP) geophysical survey is now underway. It will undertake its maiden drill program once the IP results have been assessed.
High-grade gold-copper-silver has been identified at the project site, with highly-anomalous pathfinder elements of antimony, bismuth, mercury and tellurium present. The beauty of epithermal deposits is that they are among the richest gold deposits in the world, with the astounding grades sometimes assaying at more than 1000g/t, or a kilogram of gold for every tonne of ore.
The size of an epithermal deposit is usually smaller than is found with bigger-tonnage, low-grade discoveries. However, if a project was delivering that level of elevated grades for the shiny yellow metal, it wouldn’t need to be massive to make some serious money.
Second place this week went to Augustus Minerals and like its famous namesake who brought peace to the Greco-Roman world and helped restore the republic of Rome, it enjoyed enormous popularity this week.
The company’s share price was also the recipient of a rock-chip rocket that sent it shares hurtling into the stratosphere to a high of 11.5c, up a healthy 202.63 per cent on revealing assays returning 35 per cent copper and 236g/t silver from the same sample. The samples were nabbed from the company’s Tiberius prospect, part of its 3600-square-kilometre Ti-Tree project that sits within the Gascoyne region in north-west Western Australia.
Two samples from the company’s Justinian target produced 10.11g/t and 9.34g/t visible gold, respectively, with a further 32 per cent copper stunner coming from its South Snowy ground, helping nudge the shares to its highest traded price since January this year.
Trading volumes went berserk, with the company’s daily share turnover hitting an all-time high of more than 39 million units changing hands on Thursday – its highest level since it joined the ASX in May last year. Interestingly though, not one share was traded on the Monday and Tuesday prior to Thursday’s announcement and only 50,000 units found a new home on Wednesday.
Augustus shares were placed into a trading halt prior to Friday’s market open for the purpose of planning and executing a capital raise, so it will be keenly watched now to see at what price they are next offered at to the market. The price settled at 9.3c at Thursday’s close.
Management noted 231 rock-chip samples were collected in June from a range of prospective areas, with a significant soil sampling program taking place at much of the project area. At its promising Tiberius ground that kicked-up the high-grade copper-silver sample, a soil sampling program has been completed with results being reviewed.
Augustus was recently awarded a State Government grant under the exploration incentive scheme’s (EIS) co-funded drill initiative, with its application approved by the Department of Energy, Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety (DMIRS). It resulted in a bank balance boost of up to $110,000 from the funding that will provide up to 50 per cent of the diamond drill costs.
Moab Minerals took this week’s bronze medal after deciding to join the global uranium party with the purchase of an 81.85 per cent stake in private company Linx Resources, which holds a compelling suite of advanced uranium assets in the East African country of Tanzania. The company elected to celebrate the deal even further by converting its $521,000 loan to Linx into equity, giving it 89.6 per cent ownership and exposure to one of this year’s hottest commodities.
Moab’s ASX ticker may be “MOM”, but market punters did not call for their proverbial mommy and instead, bravely sent the company’s share price to a four-month high of 0.7c on decent volumes for the at times lightly-traded stock. Volumes totalled more than 20 million shares during the three trading days after the announcement, pumping the price up by 133.33 per cent for the week.
Linx owns 80 per cent of prospecting licenses that comprise the Manyoni and Octavo uranium projects, covering a total 216sq km.
Intriguingly, a bucketload of cash has been spent on exploration and drilling at Manyoni previously, providing Moab with a huge volume of historic drilling and exploration data. Access to the information should save the company a lot of time and money as it endeavours to ramp up efforts to find what lurks beneath the promising ground.
Management says it is well-funded with $1.9 million in cash and equivalents, placing it in a strong position to begin exploration activities.
Coming in with a solid run for fourth place is Clara Resources, where it was a case of “goodbye tin” and “hello coking coal” as the $3 million market-capped minnow unloaded its stake in the London Stock Exchange (LSE)-listed First Tin operation, allowing it to acquire the remaining 60 per cent of the Ashford coking coal play based in New South Wales.
The sale of First Tin netted Clara $4.3 million, with the market effectively loving the premise of the asset swap, sending the stock up 115.38 per cent to trade at a high of 2.8c on significant volume of 11.87 million shares on Thursday. Management notes that a little more than $3 million will be paid to Savannah Resources to complete the sale of Ashford on July 16 and about $1.1 million will be used from the proceeds to discharge its debt obligations.
Clara revealed a scoping study for the Ashford project back in March this year, highlighting a robust and economic operation that would incur only a modest capital expenditure estimate of $133.6 million for the project, with $100 million needed for pre-production costs. Management expects a 12 year mine-life producing an average 1 million tonnes per annum of coking coal, with pre-tax figures of $455 million total project cashflow and an internal rate of return (IRR) of 59 per cent.
The after-tax net present value of the project showed as $156 million, with an attractive payback period of just one year based on both pre-tax and post-tax numbers.
So that ends a week that may be a turning point for the small mining sector.
If the small end of the bourse can continue to produce the discoveries the market wants to hear about, or proactively acquire the right flavour-of-the-month commodity project, it could be a case of up-and-up and really catch the eye of market punters, who follow a very different type of “chart-topper”.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
By Craig Nolan
