Re: Buckshot, please reply...bman
in response to
by
posted on
Dec 30, 2007 07:30PM
The company whose shareholders were better than its management
all in my opinion, please do your own dd. This is not meant as investment advice.
bman, hawn, wes and others,
All we have now is pure speculation. Ask a 100 people and you will probably get a 100 different cash cost per ounce.
That said, you need to know the fundamental basics before you can start making educated back of the envelope type guesses.
First off, when you're talking mining feasibilities, you should always look at the "value of the rock". What this means is how much a tonne of rock will yield you. Most people leave the recovery rate out (fdn is apparenty in the 90% range). But to be conservative, lets say FDN grades and ave of 7 grams per tonne. Based on todays spot price 7 grams x $840 an ounce gives us $189 "rock" (7grams divided by 31 grams in an ounce multiplied by $840 an ounce).
Now there are many profitable mines in the world that contain $20 rock- approx 1/9 our value at FDN but these are the big open pit type operations. Open pit type mining can now be done under $10 a tonne on the cost side of the equation. A large number of variables come into play making it really hard to determine costs(undergound bulk mining vs traditional "Ontario" type operations where high grade veins are chased, hydro vs oil as fuel, how far down your going in terms of depth, developed world vs undeveloped in terms of labour costs.
Personally when comparing up other operations around the world, my GUESS is that we're looking at costs around $40 per tonne.
Most producers in an attempt to make it easier to understand for investos report a cash cost per ounce. This number is usually provide net of any metal credits. Given a 7gram grade it will take 4.42 FDN tonnes to produce an ounce of gold(31/7=4.42). 4.42tonnes at $40 per tonne makes the cost per ounce $176.
So even though this is underground, it will be a low cost mine given the extremely high grades.
Mines go forward with IRR (internal rate of return) of 10% or better. You can run all kinds of numbers at this point. Why I'm still here is that you can give the buyer a 20% IRR at $300an ounce paid at this point. In other words any of the big producers could give us $300 an ounce, add costs of an additional $176 per ounce and this project would still be one of their "crown jewels" if gold trades at $840 for the life of the mine.
That said, it's unlikely that any producer would run their numbers at $840 gold ...more likely would be something in the neighbourhood of $600 to $650. Based on that, I suspect there would be at least five producers that would give us $200 an ounce.
Anyone who has even the smallest clue when it comes to modelling a deposit will tell you that FDN should run around 18million ounces when they finish drilling it up. $200x 18million gives us a price tag of 3.6billion or $24.82 per share.
So thats my fair value, $24.82 as long as the govt doesn't do anything rediculous like base the windfall tax under $750, etc.
Best part is that we have possible extensions to FDN and all the regional targets providing possible blue sky to boot.
Hope the above helps,
Buck
ps. great to see our captain back and the ship looks fantastic tonight.