RE:RE:Warrants Expiring carter.... diamonds are not mens best freind right now. MPV trading at 21 freaking cents. LUC 35 cents.... I don't get you sometimes bro. SA news doesn't save MTX and any action over there is still YEARS AWAY. Chad needs to hit NICU or LI in quebec. (we should publickly know in 2026) And make no mistake..
Scott Berdahl is the king of the klondike. Not fipke if you want to make a movie about a discovery. . and his promotion and touring is incredible. That's a leader.
by Will Purcell
The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Monday was a weak 62-97-151 as the TSX Venture Exchange fell fractionally to 596. Dermot Desmond and Mark Wall's Mountain Province Diamonds Inc. (MPVD) rose one cent to 21.5 cents on 321,000 shares.
Mountain Province held its own during the first quarter of 2024, producing and selling as many carats as it could at its 49-per-cent-owned Gahcho Kue mine in the Northwest Territories, while maintaining a firm grip on the cost side of the equation. Accordingly, the company eked out a modest first-quarter profit, generating enough cash to keep the wolves from its door.
Still there are questions about how the mine and Mountain Province will fare over the rest of the year. While the company and its majority co-venturer, De Beers Canada, beavered away as best they could to smooth out the production profile over the next few years, the short term still looks to be a tough stretch. "We know that 2024 has long been a challenging year for the company," says Mr. Wall, president and chief executive officer, adding that the partners "continue to focus on the operation to make 2024 the best that it can be."
All the recent beavering leaves Mountain Province with 2024 guidance calling for the processing of 3.4 million to 3.6 million tonnes of kimberlite, from which between 4.2 million and 4.6 million carats are projected to be recovered. Those numbers suggest an average grade of just 1.27 carats per tonne, which is well below the average of about 1.8 carats per tonne.
The grade drop, a long-anticipated one, is the result of dilution in the upper part of the Tuzo pipe, which averages less than one carat per tonne. (Once the pit reaches deeper into Tuzo the dilution diminishes dramatically and the grade climbs significantly.) Or at least that was the original plan. While the current guidance still suggests the Tuzo dilution is expected this year, look for a revised mining plan, expected before the end of June, to provide a much clearer picture.
Meanwhile, unexpected dilution elsewhere has been an unwelcome challenge. "During March we had a disappointing grade performance which dragged down the overall grade for the quarter," Mr. Wall says, adding that work to understand the grade performance is well under way. "That work is leading us toward very localized issues of more internal dilution than expected," Mr. Wall says, adding that the mine has historically experienced a processed grade very close to the modelled grade.
And so, Mr. Wall cheers, "as we work through these localized areas in March and April, we are anticipating a return to the grade in the mining plan as the year progresses." (Forget the weasel -- there is a hungry jackal lurking in his optimism: The dilution that began in March apparently continued through April, and now in mid-May, the company is still looking for a return to the expected grade later this year -- a grade supposedly lower than achieved in the first quarter.)
Just how significant the dilution was during the first quarter is unclear, and its impact on the current quarter is murkier still. The mine produced 1.26 million carats from about 805,000 tonnes of kimberlite in the first quarter, about 1.57 carats per tonne, if one assumes that the previous quarterly grade of just over 1.7 carats per tonne prevailed during January and February with the dilution kicking in at the start of March. If so, then the March grade would have run about 1.3 carats per tonne at best. And so, investors had best have guarded expectations for the current quarter as well.