Not Funny Anymore
posted on
Aug 14, 2012 03:14PM
Producing Mines and "state-of-the-art" Mill
Just read the latest press release about the company going back into "care and Maintenance" again due to poor nickel prices. What I could never figure out was why this company never did a budget based on $5 nickel prices less fees. There's an old rule when it came to budgets that says its best to be conservative when calculating your revenue, and liberal when it came to calculating your expenses. $7 nickel minus nsr and Xstrata processing fees were never a surprise. What is a surprise is that this new management team followed the same process to budget as the previous management team. Nothing was learned IMO.
If you can't be profitable at $7/lb then it shows there was never any hope to pay back the debt, or to even pick at it. Sad really.
The worse part about the latest press release is the last paragraph. It sounds like Jilin is thinking very hard for once about this entire Liberty project. And a further restructuring may occur since the last AGM.
A further $5,000,000 of debt to be granted to see the company through until prices recover, with the same 10% rate. Well, with over $100,000,000 of debt being carried, Liberty would have to earn over $10,000,000 just to maintain the debt, let alone pay some off. Which always made me wonder how extra development at Hart etc would occur.
The presentation from the AGM looked very good and almost had me wondering if the turnaround was near by. However when I looked at the production graph of where the ore would come from, I noticed about half of the future production was going to come from future JV/acquistions. Till now that future production is not known to shareholders. Especially for minority shareholders. A big risk IMO to see 2019 results.
So its another black arm day for this company as it sees a further 52 week low and an all time low. I guess the equity share dilution won't proceed further.