RE: RE: market cap ?Compare AVR with a market cap of $745 million to AXM.V with a market cap of $81 million and then try to guess which has the most upside over next couple of years:
Axmin is developing a 200,000 oz per year open pit gold mine in the Central African Republic (CAR). The CAR is so hungry for this kind of mining investment that it is giving Axmin a 5 year tax holiday. I think axm.v is the most undervalued soon to be intermediate gold producer and here is why:
-great management with established track records. The biggest shareholder with30% are the same people behind Addax Petroleum which a year or two ago got sold tothe Chinese for over $6 billion. Also with the recent merger with aim listed Afnat, they picked up the new CEO George Roach who has the African experience and abilities to take the company to the next level as anintermediate gold producer. Roach was one of founders of UraMin which got sold to Areva for $2.5 billion.
-asset base that can take them to 200,000 oz per year gold production with their first gold mine within 2 years (BFS already completed, just needs updating) and then on to 500 – 600,000 oz per year level in the subsequent years with their second and third gold mines.
-absurdly low market cap of only C$82 million.Assuming 1.2 billion shares outstanding post mine financing, the $200 million per year cash flow from their first mine at Passendro works out to16 cents per share.They can reinvest this cash flow to bring their second and third gold mines online with very little further share dilution, thus increasing cash flow per share to around 40+ cents per share 5-6 years out. Shareprice is now only 12 cents.
Below is more info for your DD:
https://www.axmininc.com/site/Investorsnbsp/Presentations.aspx
George Roach President and Chief Executive Officer
Mr.Roach,the former President and CEO of AfNat, has been involved in the mineral exploration industry in sub-Saharan Africa for many years. Hehas extensive experience in securing and establishing mineral exploration tenure and operations through out Africa namely,Central African Republic,South Africa, Chad, Mali, Namibia, Zambia and Tanzania to a name a few.
Mr. Roach was a founding Director and Managing Director Africa for UraMin Inc., a uranium resource company with operations in Namibia, South Africa and Central African Republic. UraMin was sold for US$2.5 billion in 2007 to Areva. Mr. Roach maintains interests in G&B African Resources Ltd, a mineral exploration company and in African agricultural projects, including a sugar estate in CAR under development and spice trading and milling operations in South Africa.
major shareholder Jean-Claude Gandur of AOG:
https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/1015/099.html
Trouble Is My Business
Christopher Helman 10.15.07, 12:00 AM ET
Billionaire Jean-Claude Gandur has braved war and corruption to build an oil empire on the cheap.
Recently a huge explosion shook northern Iraq. Not the usual kind. This blazing fire and billowing black smoke came from a test drill at Taq Taq, an oilfield 30 miles southwest of Irbil in the Kurdish region. With no pipeline or storage tanks in place, Addax Petroleum had little choice but to burn off the oil rather than let it soak into the rocky ground.Opening the well for a few minutes revealed a true gusher: a flow rate of 37,500 barrels per day. Considering the results from three other wells already completed, engineers figure that Taq Taq holds more than 2.7billionbarrels of high-quality crude and could produce as muchas200,000 bpd for ten years.
One small problem: Iraq's parliament still hasn't signed off on a federal oil law, putting the entire $500 million gamble in jeopardy. Jean-Claude Gandur, Addax's chief executive,is pushing ahead anyway. "It is absolutely unbelievable the quality of oilfields untapped in Iraq," he says. Gandur would prefer to have a law and an export license in place. But in a pinch he figures he can sell oil--up to 20,000barrels a day--to a refinery he'll help build Kurds, or hawk it straight out of the ground. "Peace has no value to our assets."
Gandur knows his way around trouble. Most of his business is in restive Nigeria,where Addax produces 100,000bpd--overshadowed by only Shell, Exxon Mobil(nyse: XOM - news - people ),Chevron (nyse:CVX - news - people ), Total and Agip. The company is also pursuing prospects in Cameroon and Gabon.Wherever it ventures, Addax does very well. Over the last 12 months it netted $300 million on revenue of $2.5 billion. Run out of Geneva,Switzerland, Addax is listed on the Toronto and London exchanges; Gandur's 24% stake is worth $1.5billion. His m.o.has long been buying assets on the cheap--and making nice with strongmen. "Jean-Claude is able to open the doors and negotiate on his feet," says Martin Molyneaux, an analyst at First Energy (nyse: FE- news- people ) Capital, a Canadian investment bank in Calgary, Alta.and an Addax underwriter. "He is very good at interacting with people."People close to Sani Abacha, the late dictatorof Nigeria, for example.Gandur has also been dubbed Commander of the National Order in Benin, has a diplomatic passport from Senegal,andfor ten years was the honorary consul in Geneva for the civil-war-riven Republic of Congo.
The son of a Swiss pediatrician,Gandur, now 58,grew up in Alexandria, Egypt,where he learned Arabic,fell in love with history and began a life long devotion to Egyptian antiquities. He studied law and political science at the University of Lausanne. In 1976he went to work at the Philipp Brothers trading house in Zug, Switzerland:"the best school in the world," he says. There he became a successor to infamous trader Marc Rich, who had left the company in 1973. Early on Gandur gravitated to francophone Africa and became manager of Philbros' African oil trading operations. After stints atrival trading houses, in1987 he and three partners set up their own west African trading operation, Addax & Oryx Group, named after two members of the African antelope family.
Soon AOG began acquiring physical assets to backstop trading positions, picking up oil storage tanks, petroleum depots, liquefied petroleum gas and oilfields. The company even branched out into gold mines (Gandur is chairman of Toronto-listed Axmin).
https://www.miningweekly.com/article/car-ministers-in-push-to-reassure-investors-on-axmin-gold-project-2010-10-05
CAR officials in show of support for Axmin gold project
By: Liezel Hill 5th October 2010
TORONTO(miningweekly.com)– Senior government officials from the CentralAfrican Republic (CAR) met mining analysts and institutional investors in Toronto on Tuesday, in an effort to help bolster the financial community's view of junior Axmin and its Passendro gold project in the CAR.
Axmin received a 25-year mining licence for Passendro in August this year, and now has all the permits and approvals it needs to build the mine.
Under the terms of the licence, Axmin will pay the CAR government $11-million in three tranches and the government has received 26-million Axmin shares and 20-million warrants, instead of the 10% free-carried interest in theproject to which it was entitled.
The government has also maintained all the fiscal terms agreed to in a mining convention, or contract, signed with Axmin for the Passendro project in 2006.
These include a five-year tax holiday,exemption from duties and VAT on capital equipment, consumables and mining contractfor the duration of the mine development and five years there after. The government royalty on the project was also held at 2,25%,as specified in the convention.
Speaking through a translator on Tuesday, CAR Minister for Mines lieutenant colonel Sylvain Ndoutingai said that the mining conventions between the government and private mining companies are structured to provide security for the foreign investors.
Governments can change, the mining law could be modified by the Parliament, but companies are protected by stability clauses in their conventions, he said.
He pointed to the fact that Axmin's licence includes terms agreed to in its 2006 mining convention, despite the establishment of a new national mining code in 2009, he said.
Ndoutingai said that the Passendro project – which will be the first modern gold mine in the CAR - has the full support of the government.
He actually indicated that he intends to put pressure on Axmin to get the project moving as quickly as possible, and said that the State has no intention of selling the shares it received in the company.
The CAR has gold,diamonds, uranium and iron-ore, and the government wants to attract investors to explore for those and other metals and minerals, Ndoutingai said.
PRODUCTION IN TWO YEARS?
Axmin is busy updating and optimising its April 2008 bankable feasibility study, and plans to have the document ready by the end of the first quarter of 2011, although it will aim for an earlier date, CEO George Roach said in an interview on Tuesday. The company has revived the process towards arranging financing for the mine, and this week issued an information memorandum to a number of banks, he said.
Axmin is looking in particular at South African export credit opportunities, as well as entities like the World Bank's Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency. “And the reason for that is that South Africa's Senet is leading the BFS, so a lot of equipment is going to come out of South Africa,” Roach said. “So if we can get export finance dealt with there - and the negotiations are already in progress - it's going to make everything so much easier.”
There is quite a lot of interest in the project, CFO Alex Dann said.“But the banks and the equity markets want to see the final project economics and the technicalinformation,”he said.
In March 2009 Axmin looked at a smaller project scenario, given the difficult financing environment at the time, but the company is reasonably certain that it will be building a three-million ton a year operation, as envisaged in its 2008 study, Roach said on Tuesday.
Annual gold production was forecast at 203 000 oz/y in the feasibility study.
If the company completes its updated study in the first quarter of 2011, it would likely only start drawing down finance in the third quarter, Roach said.
The firm has agreed with the government to aim for first production within 24 months, although it can apply for exemptions to the deadline.
“We'd like to be in production in two years, and that's what the State would like to see,” he said. “But it's tight.”
Shares in TSX Venture Exchange-listed Axmin dipped 8% on Tuesday, to 11,5 Canadian cents a share.
Edited by: Liezel Hill
Fact sheet:
https://www.axmininc.com/site/Investorsnbsp/FactSheet.aspx
https://clients.westminster-digital.co.uk/minesite/microsite/events/31/index.aspx
fast forward 2 clips
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"I’ve really been keen on AXMIN. It’s got probably three million ounces in the Central African Republic. AXMIN is extremely well-placed, I think. It has just over 200 million shares and trades about 80 cents. But given the number of ounces it’s got in the solid resource category in Central African Republic, as well as they’ve got unfolding resources in both Mali and Sierra Leone, it’s a fascinating African play."(11/29/07)
- JOHN EMBRY, SPROTT ASSET MANAGEMENT
"Going alittle further a field, there's AXMIN (AXM.TSX.V). It just got annihilated. They have four million ounces in theCentral African Republic. It was at $1.40 and is now down to $.15. You’re buying the people because they discovered the Geita Mine, now in production in Tanzania, which is one of the more successful mines in Africa. This is the best exploration team in Africa. They’ve got this project inthe Central African Republic with a proven reserve and, then another one in Ghana and a third in the Sierra Leone, which they’re moving forward.The stock has been blasted, but they’ve got Audax Petroleum,one of the big Swiss oil companies, which owns 50% of this company, toback stop to any extent required. There's no financing risk; they have assets; and the best mine-finding team in Africa. You get all this for $30 million."
- The Gold Report Interview with John Embry, Sprott Asset Management (09/12/08)