RE: great presentation heads-up... - during the slide presentation , while showing the 3-D open pit model, Catherine, mentioned the that they expect the pit size to expand significantly going forward...what does that mean?, .....longer life of mine?......much bigger deposit at KIP......and Suprise/ Nord is not far away.......500 meters away..it will add to life of mine.
Look at page 12 of the presentation. They have a discovery at the upper left corner of the kipawa deposit 300 meters from the defined resource. IF that is part of the continuous Kipawa resource, then the deposit will be expanded considerably and the mine could either increase from a 12.9 year mine to a 15-20 year mine. Or, perhaps they could increase the production rate from 5000tpa. That is a question I have -- can they increase annual production? Will the processing capability be such that they could expand production if desired? Or would that require a greater capex than currently planned?
Caution here. Matamec is clear about the NI43-101 defined resource. The project at Kipawa is clear and a go given the available confirmed resource. However, there are strong hints here that it might increase in size but further drilling is needed to validate that. All of this would be covered under the MOU with Toyota.
I know Matamec has taken considerable criticism for the JV arrangement with Toyota and "selling 49% of their mine for 17.5M". However, given the very low market cap of MAT (~42M fully diluted), any arrangement for financing to do it themselves would have had substantial equity dilution. A very low market cap creates serious problems for raising substantial amounts of capital.
The details when the JV is finally finalized will be interesting to see. Hard to know what the final valuation of this project is without those details.