RE:RE:RE:RE:Cup half Empty vs. Cup half Full>> worried about: 1.) a very weak financial report in late august (1-3 cent loss) & 2.) an indication that more money might be needed. <<
At this stage of ramping, the earning number does not matter. It will always be worse than steady state production. What matters is the amount of cash they have. Their $10m funding was right at the end of Q2 so they couldn't have spent that. Q2 report should have over $10m cash. The $5m from the royalty was 1 month before end of Q2. Could they have spent all $5m in one month? Plus whatever was left from cash balance.
The Q1 report said construction costs will tail-off for Q2. >> They should be able to avoid the truck down time as long as the fleet is large enough. <<
They did increase the fleet from 9 to 11 trucks and had enough to start the second pit. I have heard other miners doing maintenace in June with downtime, so June could be a common time for miners to do maintenance. They said there was 'routine' maintenance "All other haulage and loading equipment was down for routine preventive maintenance." It is common for miners to have variations in production per quarter. I wouldn't consider a single month of downtime maintenance to be indicative of a problem. They already said that availability has returned to normal.
On the bright side, their production didn't drop by much even with the downtime and lack of 2 circuits. When they are back up, production would very likely be higher.
>> but I wonder if it will somewhat reset the ramp-up clock back to May baseline production. <<
The news release says their full leach cycle is 45 days which is faster than most miners which can take 90 days.
"The result of these two items being off-line was a decrease in efficiency of the carbon plant to attract the gold thus decreasing gold production." It sounds like the gold is already in the solution and they just need to return the carbon extraction efficiency back to normal.