Regarding Iron Ore, Ilmenite and PGM
Note: MS: “ We have very significant quantities of iron”. Now that Largo is selling FeV, it’s likely that they will abandon the idea of attempting to sell our huge inventory of iron ore. The big stockpile of iron ore which was lying around gathering dust is now being used toward the production of our own FeV. So Largo should be a low cost producer of FeV as iron, one of the key raw materials, is readily available for free in house.
From Q2 - 18 CC
Piyush Sood, Morgan Stanley, Research Division - Research Associate [7]
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Any plans of, say, monetizing your tailings or extracting some more value from them?
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Mark Allan Smith, Largo Resources Ltd. - CEO & Director [8]
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Thank you, again. We have 3 different technical projects that we're working on, on various portions of tailings at the site. And the answer is absolutely yes. We have very significant quantities of titanium. We have very significant quantities of iron. And we have some reasonably significant quantities of PGMs in one part of our tailings. And we're looking at possible ways to extract value from those minerals and return that to the shareholders as well. We have 1 project in particular that's focused on the titanium side of things. And the initial results from the tests that we've done have actually been very favorable, and we could undertake a very -- it's a very insignificant cost to the project, but we could start selling some ilmenite by the end of this year, early part of next year. So we are looking at every possible way of taking value from the minerals that are in our ore body and returning that to the shareholders as soon as possible.
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Piyush Sood, Morgan Stanley, Research Division - Research Associate [9]
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So should we think of these small projects as really the tens of millions of dollars or are they collectively like less than $100 million? Or are they fairly insignificant like, in total, less than $10 million? Any sense would be really helpful.
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Mark Allan Smith, Largo Resources Ltd. - CEO & Director [10]
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Let say's the one that I just mentioned concerning ilmenite is less than $10 million. And then collectively, we don't know exactly what that total could be on some of the others, for instance, the iron ore side of the equation. Because now you get into much bigger volumes and, of course, the price associated with equipment with larger volumes can take the project up higher. So one thing for sure that we will be looking at, and Ernest laid this out in his comments, our first priority is the reduction of debt. The second priority will be how can we absolutely maximize returns to shareholders, and when we find projects like our current expansion project that have paybacks of 6 weeks, we will undertake those types of efforts immediately and very efficiently. So we're not looking at spending money foolishly. We want to make sure that we either spend that money on behalf of the shareholders and make sure there's a great return for them or that we return the money or buy shares back, whatever one makes most sense.
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