Towel thrownFinally dumped this - immeditely after the latest disaster. I have spent 4-5 years following this company off and on and lost several thousand dollars on it. I have invested in some pretty dismal companies in my time (SanGold anyone ?) but most of those (at least in the junior mining space) proved to be thinly veiled scams. I think the people at TV might actually be trying. The question is if you are actually trying, how do you manage to screw up absolutely everything you touch ?
When Grimbeek took over from Cruze the situation wasn't great, Trevali's assets weren't top tier and they had operational and cost control issues. Nevermind, Grimbeek was touted as a serious miner, somebody who was hands on and understood how to operate a mine.
His tenure has been nothing short of a disaster. None of their mines is operating anywhere near its alleged potential. Every major strategic or operational decision they have made has been wrong.
One thing I find pretty entertaining about Trevali's quarterly reports is the amount of space they devote to 'market ouitlook'. Yet they entered into debillitating hedges for Caribou's production and disposed of Santander, both at exactly the wrong time, ie before a spike in the Zn price. Without hedges both Caribou and Santander would be quite profitable and Santander would be their lowest cost mine (a dubious achievement).Clearly they are utterly clueless about the price direction, so why devote so much time to it ? Is that so you don't have to discuss the myriad of operational misteps ?
The other thing they like to discuss a lot is ROL. Unfortunately no other mining company seems remotely interested in it. At best it is a moonshot, at worse more bait and switch.
Grimbeek was hired as a mine operator, yet now even as a Trevali is downsizing they are out there trying to hire a COO to take over what Grimbeek was hired to do. The first one never turned up for work, maybe he saw what he was getting in to. So what will Grimbeek's role be after the new COO comes in ? Strategic decision-making ? Shareholder and anallyst coomunication ? I haven't listened to his recent podcast yet, but if it is anything like his quarterly presentations it will sound like an elementary school student reading their essay in front of the class. Scripted and leaden. If he can't run mines and has no communication ability or vision for the company what is his purpose ?
I honestly don't think Perkoa will ever reopen under Trevali. They appeared to have a 2 year timeline for it before this tragedy and I would imagine in its aftermath there will be months of investigation and study, not to mention possible legal actions. One does wonder what happened to those missing millions of pounds of Zn from Perkoa, that can't be a counting error. Millions of pounds is a lot of stuff to go missing ... and there is a new, likely corrupt, military government in power in B-F. A cynic might believe they demanded their cut.
Caribou seems to be in permenant underperform mode, not even operating at 70% of what was confidently predicted by managemnet (after extensive study). The only thing that can save it is if Zn stays sky high after the hedges run out and if the silver price were to double.
That leaves R-P. Right now it is performing poorly. With $200 million it could supposedly be a tier 1 low-cost producer. Anyone who believes "the gang who couldn't shoot straight" can deliver a project of that complexity on time and budget and operating with the cost structure they promised hasn't been paying attention. Will someone lend them the money ? Given the present circumstances I really doubt it. That would mean yet another highly dilutive equity issue - assuming they can find buyers.I think RP2 gets done eventually, but not by TV.
If you had told me two years ago that Zn woas going to be over $2 a pound, I would have assumed that even with sub-par management my investment would have 5x'd. What TV has shown is that no commodity price is high enough for some companies to succeed. It isn't enough to get the direction of a commodity right, your chosen proxy has to be adequate to track it. In this Trevali has failed dismally.