Concerning numbers Part 3
It seems we are hitting new 52-week lows ever day now. The spin crowd keeps pushing the buy opportunity, and do so with such great vigour....lol. I’m not there yet. It’s a hold for me as I see more issues with NHK than just their exposure to this crappy market. Great to see the company cashed up but my bigger concern is the well documented dismal exploration record of this management team. I stressed that in my last post and was also the only one who predicted that the VP Exploration would be canned. But changing the jockey mid-race does nothing to create an air of confidence. On the contrary, it establishes that management and board have found their sacrificial lamb to ram under the NHK bus. He most certainly didn’t operate in a vacuum. Approvals for drill programs and budgets come from board level so there’s lots of blame to be shared by all, but none being shouldered.
The 2021 exploration program was a disaster, and the numbers speak loudly for themselves. Results for 135 holes of the 272 holes drilled in 2021, or roughly 50% of the holes drilled have not been released, meaning that 39,296 metres of the 72,325 metre total, or 54% of all metres drilled in 2021, have not been reported!! No doubt they were blanks. We are talking about roughly $20 million dollars of drilling. An insane amount of money for any junior to have spent without an explanation from the company as to what all those missing holes actually accomplished. Anyone else find it strange that not one of the mining analysts picked up on this? Our main “cheerleader” at Sprott, who has no problem pointing out companies that might have missed their quarterly production numbers or whose exploration strategies might not align with his own limited practical experience, has not written a single word on the NHK 2021 train wreck of a drill program. However, he wrote several times about how competent the previous VP Ex was, and how the new management team was sure to deliver on the 2-year program. Well that VP couldn’t deliver on the first year of the 2-year program and was promptly and quietly forced out for his shoddy execution, and our man at Sprott had nothing to say about it. Pathetic, and a prime example as to why mining analysts are of limited use to the average shareholder. So now the company has abandoned their much promoted 2-year program to be substituted with a “new and improved” 3-year program, and no indications that they have addressed the significant failings of their 2021 drill campaign, other than to hire a new, less experienced, person and throw him into this year’s drilling with little time to prepare or get a handle on the failures of the 2021 program. Doesn’t sound like a recipe for success to me.
So here we are the uninformed shareholders, fifteen weeks since the last news release on drill results and not a “peep” from the company or any of the mining analysts as to the status of 135 drill holes that still remain unaccounted for. If the dismal 2021 drill performance remains unaddressed then can we realistically expect to see improvements in 2022? I hope so, as the ground deserves a much better effort than 2021 drilling has delivered, but given their track record so far, I remain concerned and sceptical of their ability to deliver. Maybe the new guy can revitalize my faith in their collective capabilities. Either way, we won’t get a read on that until July at the earliest when 2022 drill results start to be reported. For the time being I’ll sit tight and hope they can get their house in order ASAP.