Friday's AGMIt was a pretty empty room, but some of the details were new to me -- You can find the presentation that they made in the link that Sunny posted. Some of the more interesting points off the top of my head early on a Saturday:
- Ari opened with the remarks that this year moving from exploratory to production is always tough for investors as drilling is to map out the ramp etc; not assay/drilling results for the mineralization. Not a real shock to anyone.
- Take a look in the slides< I think it's slide 8. The Western Zone and down below that the GT Zone. See how they line up? They are now doing some drilling to link the two zones together -- if the mineralization joins, that's a significant jump in the amount of resources available.
- This year they hope to achieve more than 65% of the underground ramp -- but they were cautiously optimistic they will do better than that. 2011 will have some surface drilling, and a LOT of underground drilling. Ari explained that underground drilling is a faster way for them to pull core samples; and now with an Assay lab down the road (The one they used last time), there will be a faster turnaround time from drill to release. They estimate 25,000m of underground drilling this year, depending of course on conditions and ramp development speed -- but that was their conservative estimate. (Anyone that was there feel free to jump in here and add/correct)
- Slide 12 gives you a picture of the ramp and where/how they are going to cut it, and drill from there. Again they mentioned how difficult it is to surface drill in this area, and they've had to redrill some holes due to breakage and other problems. This won't be an issue with underground drilling (I'm not a geologist but I'm assuming it's based on the composition of the earth at depth versus going top down through the crust).
- Vale is dumping a huge amount of money into the area in infrastructure to support their mining activities, which in turn builds up the base for Colossus to utilize (Power, staffing and so on.. Usually a difficult endeavour to find skilled mining staff in remote areas however with the history in this area and Vale's involvement to date they have had no issue getting the right people on board).
- Anyone notice slide 22? Anyone? Going after the resource under the pit from the surface and from underground, these should be some amazing results considering what these folks pulled out of the ground with their bare hands (2 million ounces was I believe the number they referenced).
They seem to have a pretty tight grasp on what they are doing this year, I'm looking forward to the results.