RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:Newmont delays Peru expansionBlue, you really think the two majors are eager for a JV partnership? Maybe they should watch Wall Street and listen to what Gordon Gekko is famous for saying: "Greed is good".
If companies weren't focused on maximizing shareholder value (i.e. being greedy) we wouldn't have a solid base for our capitalistic market structure.
We know that RIO can easily go it alone. RIO likely has zero appetite to JV with NEM, so I think that NEM will have to bite the bullet and get comfy with introducing copper into their mix if they want the 25+ million ounces of gold in the emerging Casino District.
I get that in an ideal world, NEM would just mine the gold and offload the cost and revenue for the copper onto a JV partner. However, those are not the cards dealt the players. Once the project is shovel ready and more or less fully derisked, the capex is just a component within the NPV, nothing more, nothing less. Just numbers, nothing to get worried about for the world's largest gold miner.
Remember what Paul said in the Crux interview, you can slash the capex and start smaller, but the end result will be a net decrease to the overall NPV and cashflow. You want more $$, you have to have larger capex. Newmont is sitting on over $4 billion in cash, we aren't dealing with the boy scouts here, they are a behemoth.