The uranium debate in Australia is raging over whether or not the element should be allowed to fuel the nation’s future with domestic nuclear power.
But with uranium prices hitting an upward trend recently, ASX-listed companies have been showing a propensity to want to get in on the act and investors seem to be following suit.
While this edition of Bulls N’ Bears Runners of the Week features a local gold-hunting firm, a high-tech Australian company that has set-up shop in the United States looking to print up a metal storm in the defence sector and a firm which may have been heard whispering, “we might need a bigger boat” after the sale of one of its vessels, it was a Canadian uranium chaser that topped the pops.
Infini Resources produced high-grade – ahh, let’s call them lab-busting – results from soil sampling conducted at its Portland Creek uranium project in the Canadian province of Newfoundland.
And get this … the company says the grades were so high, they were beyond the detection limits of the laboratory! A stunning 17 samples were returned grading higher than the 1.18 per cent (11,792 parts per million) uranium oxide maximum limits that could be detected from the type of assay sampling method used.
The news put a rocket under Infini’s share price as it launched from a previous close of 15.5c to touch 44.5c the day after the announcement – up an impressive 187.1 per cent. It then went even further to a nearly 226 per cent hike today, reaching a high of 50.5c for the week.
It was the company’s highest-traded price since the day it listed on the market on January 15 this year. Punters kicked trading volumes out of the park, with 7.3 million shares changing hands on Monday and another 5.65 million swapped the following day, numbers only bettered by Infini’s first two trading days back in January and mega-levels above its daily average.
The samples taken from its Talus prospect within Portland Creek have been re-submitted for a type of analysis capable of detecting to an upper limit of 15 per cent uranium oxide.
The high-grade samples defined a 235m-by-100m zone coincident with an historic radon gas anomaly and the zone remains open to the east and west. The company revealed 39 samples returned more than 1000ppm uranium oxide, with soil sampling covering only 400m of a prospective 3.2km-long zone defined by historic radiometric data and radon gas surveys.
Interestingly, the average background reading in soils is 8ppm, so the peak anomalous sample of 11,792ppm is a staggering 1474 times greater. Radon is a radioactive gas that has no smell, colour or taste.
Dare we say it, if the majority of results exceed the 15 per cent upper limit of the new assay tests, Infini will really be cooking with gas.
Waratah Minerals took the silver medal this week with a 170.83 per cent gain after revealing further head-turning gold intersections from its latest reverse-circulation (RC) drill results at the company’s Spur gold-copper project that sits on the Lachlan Fold Belt in New South Wales.
Its stock bolted to 31c on the fourth of July, resulting in joyous celebrations, picnics, parades and baseball games. Actually, that only really occurs in the good ol’ US of A on July 4 each year, however, celebrations would have been rolling out for the punters who bought into the company late last week for just 12c.
The price reached a peak of 32.5c this morning. Significant volumes of 12.7 million units on Wednesday and 8.84 million on Thursday were only surpassed during the past three years on a heavily-traded day in December last year.
Results from one particular drillhole is what really sent the market meerkats into a tizz, hitting 89m at 1.73 grams per tonne gold and 0.08 per cent copper from 115m including 57m going 2.5g/t with 0.11 per cent copper from 115m and a further 9m at 9.33g/t gold and 0.38 per cent copper from 163m.
Aided by a solid 24m at 1.66g/t gold and 0.04 per cent copper that included a 3m slice at 5.34g/t gold with 0.11 per cent copper from 52m, the result was exactly what the market was looking for. It followed an initial eye-catching hit of 7m at 16.78g/t gold and 0.18 per cent copper from 154m that was reported last week, but didn’t really move the needle.
However, with the latest numbers, it is now well and truly off and running.
Perhaps the real jolt for the share price to shift came from the realisation that the project sits about 5km west from US gold giant Newmont Corporation’s Cadia Valley project that has produced more than 50 million ounces of gold and 9.5 million tonnes of copper since its 1992 discovery.
Third placing was nabbed by high-tech firm AML3D, with a solid 157.89 per cent share price gain after it highlighted the $1.1 million sale of its 2600 Edition ARCEMY metal 3D printing system to US Department of Defence intermediary, BlueForge Alliance. The stock jumped from a close of 9.5c at end of last week to hit 24.5c on Friday after the market digested the news of the sale that includes an initial one-year service and maintenance contract.
A key objective for the company is the development of annually-recurring service and maintenance contracts to build a cash-flow pipeline. The system that sold has been leased from BlueForge for the past nine months by navy component supplier, Laser Welding Solutions.
Potentially opening up a further boost to sales, Laser Welding has the option to buy two additional 2600 Edition ARCEMY systems as it seeks to support the development of metal 3D printed components for the US Navy’s submarine industrial base. Management was chuffed that its first lease agreement culminated in the conversion to a sale and believes the company is making inroads with its advanced technology to become a regular supplier to the US defence sector.
AML3D combines state-of-the-art robotics automation, materials engineering, welding science and proprietary software in its 3D printing systems. The 10-year-old company has its headquarters and manufacturing hub in the State of Ohio and is laser-focused on extracting maximum opportunities across the US defence sector, in addition to targeting global oil and gas and aerospace companies, with its high-tech eye also firmly gazing in the marine industries direction.
Management has also cast an even wider look out into the Australian and United Kingdom defence sectors. It says it can see the benefits of the two nations being AUKUS partners in a trilateral security partnership covering the Indo-Pacific region between the pair and the United States.
Just missing out on a podium finish this week is Wellard – an agribusiness that specialises in livestock transport to customers globally. A July 1 reveal that the company has a binding contract to sell its oldest livestock vessel for a cool US$12 million (AU$18.1 million), propelled its shares to a two-month high of 4.1c on higher than usual volumes.
The number of shares traded hit 2.84 million on the day of the announcement, Wellard’s heaviest trading day since 2022. The gain of 141.18 per cent was boosted by management’s statement that it intends to return the bulk of the sales proceeds to shareholders and it is assessing the best available option for that process.
After fees and commissions, the sale is expected to net Wellard US$11.8 million (AU$17.8 million) and will be subject to the agreed Norwegian Shipbrokers Association’s memorandum of agreement for sale and purchase of ships, providing standard terms and conditions that have been adopted internationally for the sale of such ocean-going ships.
The company appears to dabble predominantly in the transfer of cattle rather than sheep – a positive in the current environment of recently-approved Australian legislation banning live sheep exports from May 1, 2028.
And with a slowdown in livestock exports from Australia, Wellard has refocused its activities to the growing South America-to-Turkey cattle run. Encouragingly, one of the company’s other ships, the M/V Ocean Drover, is committed to charters booked for the remaining calendar year for the shuttle to Turkey.
That distance is obviously a bit further than the cattle run through the Newmarket stockyards in Melbourne that was just opposite from where this columnist once lived.
A run down memory lane rekindles a sprint through those stockyards as a five-year old, with the oncoming cattle bearing down – a significantly more stressful situation than collecting a big boost to the bank balance that appears to await Wellard.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
By Craig Nolan
