Unidentified Audience Member
(inaudible - microphone inaccessible)
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Ron Millos, Teck Resources Limted - SVP, Finance & CFO
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No, we still do a lot of work with the juniors on the exploration side. And when we get involved with the juniors, it's -- you're after the particular property. And we have a number of investments in juniors and we also have a number of interest in exploration plays with juniors. Whether you take shares or you get some back in rates -- it depends on the negotiations and what the parties want, but effectively, you can double the spend on a particular property by funding the development work of a particular property with a junior and backing into an ownership interest in that property.
And we do the same thing with our existing properties. We will farm out the exploration work and let the junior back into a particular property and something comes of it. And hopefully you get an opportunity, but finding a particular property through the exploration route is one of the most challenging parts of the business. And you look at our existing operations, most of them have come through the acquisition side of the business.
But a lot of that acquisition has come through the work that the exploration guys have done and understanding what's going on in particular opportunities in their jurisdictions and recommending that it's something we move forward on. So we want something that's meaningful to the Company. We want a meaningful position in an industry.
That's hard to do in all of the commodities and things are expensive. Although people think that now is a great time to buy because everybody's share prices are down, intuitively, that makes sense, but when you find the entity that you're really interested in, if it's something that's good, it's usually got three or four major shareholders that have a significant portion of the ownership of the particular entity and they tend to want, instead of the normal 30% premium that you get with a commodity price on that, they want 60%, 70%, 80% premiums and, therefore, the economics of that transaction, we can't make it work.
