CEO interview
This guy inspires confidence big time...Silver below 19$. I am adding to my FR investment. https://www.kitco.com/news/2014-09-17/New-Silver-Fix-Still-Irks-This-Mining-CEO.html Denver (Kitco News) - In a bid to heighten transparency, the mining and silver industries have taken steps towards improvement for investors, but First Majestic Silver Corp.’s (TSX:FR)(NYSE:AG) Keith Neumeyer isn’t buying into it. Speaking with Kitco News at the 25th Denver Gold Forum, Neumeyer, president and chief executive officer of First Majestic, doesn’t see an improvement. “Any transparency is healthy and the mining industry needs to put out numbers that make sense to the market,” he said. “Adversely, all-in sustaining cash costs don’t make sense to the market. “Costs are costs, I don’t know why you have a special way of measuring costs,” Neumeyer continued. “I wouldn’t be including non-cash items – people want to see treasury, they want to see cash in the bank and the measure of your success is treasury growth. “The way mining companies are reporting now, it still leaves holes and it still keeps the investor wondering what mining companies’ costs actually are.” Turning to the recently released LBMA Silver Price, replacing the 117 year-old London Silver Fix, Neumeyer said he doesn’t see much of a change. “Any time you have a small group of people fixing a price, it’s prone to manipulation,” he said. “There’s no change from how it was done before to the way it’s done now – it’s just a different group of players and now they do it on a computer. Asked if senior silver producers getting together and creating their own silver fix would be an option, Neumeyer thought it was feasible, but tricky. “You need big players to do it,” he said. “Silver’s a weird metal because you’ve got 70% production coming from base metal mines, and it’s just a by-product to them – they don’t really care about it. “For us, as a primary silver producer, I’d say it’s a good idea – get all the primary silver producers in one room, and there’s not many of them, and get them to fix the price.” Neumeyer noted it may be tough to get all major players on-board because not everyone would be open to the prospect. “The mining industry is the only industry that doesn’t fix its own price for its product,” he said. “All we can do is watch our own costs.” First Majestic has been implementing a new process geared towards automation and innovation. “It’s expensive; it will be about a $20 million investment,” Neumeyer said. “We’re only about a quarter through and hope to be finished by 2015 but we’re seeing the reduction in costs as every time we bring another system in, costs go down. His final thoughts on mining were to the point. “Mining has to smarten up and treat its business as a manufacturing business,” Neumeyer said. “We produce a product, we need to make a margin and we need to be a profitably run industry.”