RE:RE:Calibre OutperformsOn the B2Gold Deal, Libertad was on its way to decomissioning because it was running out of resource. I'm willing to bet B2Gold considered the hub and spoke model that Calibre is now running but there are a few reasons they wouldn't want to execute that themselves. These are my opinion as I can't obviously speak for B2G. Their focus was on their big Oz, long mine life projects in Africa. Nicaragua built B2Gold, but as a senior producer they have to focus on big resource long life mines with ultra low AISC because that's what the market wants and they're a senior producer. Investing money on drill campaigns in Nicaragua to delineate numerous half a million Oz resources that cannot by themselves support a mill (thereby requiring trucking that raises AISC) would not be well received by the market for a senior producer.
By spinning out Nicaragua to Calibre, they've retained exposure to what they know are produtive assets with lots of potential without having to incorporate the negative image higher AISCs and smaller deposits would have on the company. Calibre also gave them $100 million - don't know if B2Gold really needed the cash at the time or not, but my guess the other stuff I mentioned was more important. I don't believe B2Gold has ever sold a share nor will anytime soon. They used to own about a 1/3rd before they were diluted in the Fiore acquisition. Someone on this forum mentioned they spoke with some B2Gold reps at PDAC and the reps said they love what Calibre is doing.
I don't think many of those concessions were granted recently; I believe most were staked in 2020. If you look on Calibre's website, you'll see a significant chunk of that is in the Borosi region where the company has an exploration partnership with Rio Tinto. Rio Tinto is looking for porphorys and apparently there's plenty of geological and other reasons to think there are some on those concessions. Since Calibre is gold focused, they've basically farmed out porphory hunting to Rio Tinto while they focus on pure gold deposits.
Nicaragua is like Ecuador - way under explored and developed. The fact that Calibre is hitting bonanza grades at Limon is exciting - this is in one of the few parts of Nicaragua that have historically been pretty well drilled and explored (by B2Gold when they delineated their resource to justify the Limon mill) and demonstrates some of the in-country potential. I think its highly likely that new "Limon" and "Libertad" level gold regions will be discovered in country. Calibre's problem right now frankly is that they have more drilling targets than they have drills - because B2Gold ran the mineral reserves almost down to 0 before spinning off the assets to Calibre, the company's drilling has been heavily focused on re-building reserves and expanding existing known deposits. I'm excited for when the company can devote most of their rigs to new exploration rather than resource delineation and expansion.