RE:RE:PDAC UpdatesHi all,
I did in fact go talk to Ucore (Mark) early this afternoon. It was very informative.
To start, I clarified their deal with IBC in that Ucore has the rights to MRT in regards to REEs, tailings, Scandium, and Lithium (I stressed lithium to make sure this was in fact under Ucore's rights and not exclusive to IBC). It sounded like Ucore's relationship with IBC was great and both entities were excited to be working with eachother. For those of you who have followed the company for a while, Mark did offhandedly bring up the SPE technology in my discussion with him. As a refresher for those who don't know: this was a separation technology that Ucore was pursuing back in 2013 or so. Then, all of a sudden, MRT was the big thing and SPE was never talked of again. Mark's comment was that SPE might turn out to be an amazing separation technology but it hadn't been proven yet at full scale production (like MRT has for copper and PGMs) which is ultimately why they switched.
It seems like their Alaskan investor is keeping them on their toes. He is very much involved and actively updated in terms of the company's progress. Take that information as you will in regards to his conversion from the royalty into common shares. I personally find it re-assuring that the people who have put down a lot of money are keeping tabs and have added more money.
For those of you speculating that with revenue coming in from MRT deals, they might not take the AIDEA loan: this is not true. They will definitely be taking that loan. Mark speculated that it would loaned on a basis of 4-6% depending on current rates and that you simply can not get an industrial loan for cheaper (even if those numbers are off and it's higher, it will still be the cheapest money they can get). They would use this money to build infrastructure and the government would lease all of it to Ucore over the lifespan of the mine (or something to that effect). This means that the internal rate of return would be better in their first years because they're not spending huge capital all at once to build stuff. This makes Ucore profitable earlier.
They are looking into Lithium separation. For those of you shouting TESLA! obviously Mark could not go into details with me; he did say they had had very preliminary talks with some producers of Lithium. I personally took this to mean NOT Tesla as Tesla is an end user of lithium. To be fair, I didn't even bring up Tesla and Mark didn't mention them. Bottomline: nothing new outside of the press releases on lithium. Mark said they are very conscious of the fact that with this resource, timing is everything.
No new information was provided to me about the possibility of splitting the company into a mining technology company and a straight mining company. Mark said maybe some time down the road (to me this seemed like it was on their minds in the years to come but nothing anywhere in the short term). I talked a little about share dilution with him and to paraphrase: "I'm a shareholder too so all of us have an interest in keeping dilution to a minimum. We've done the best we can with the economic climate, REE pricing, etc.. to minimize dilution while moving the company forward."
There was no mention of outer space or asteroids in my discussion with him.
That's all for now!
Cheers,
Imprint