Drilling I blame the majority of the downward trend on the inability of the company to get drill results back in a timely manner. You can't spend $40 million a year and wait 5 or 6 months into the next year before getting results back. Last drill results were 2 months ago. They have a huge budget again this year.
They determined that timeliness was a problem last year so they built their own lab. I guess this shows it wasn't the quality of the samples that was the problem. If it was just lousy results they are not material and don't have to be reported so why build a lab.
If this is going to be the weakest quarter for production then that should already be baked in. In the conference call they said that costs would be the same as Q4 and the avg selling price should come in at $1685. It should still be a highly profitable quarter regardless of the production.
Wes