Diamond & Specialty Minerals Summary for March 26, 2024
2024-03-26 19:07 ET - Market Summary
by Will Purcell
The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Tuesday was a weak 65-92-153 as the TSX Venture Exchange rose one point to 548. James Cambon's Hudson Resources Inc. became Anortech Inc. (ANOR) late last week, but the change of name did not inspire new market enthusiasm. Oh, its stock did double on Friday -- not that a two-cent gain on 12,000 shares is much to write home about -- and it held the gain Monday on 134,000 shares, but today it failed to trade a board lot.
Today's Anortech is a poor facsimile of yesteryear's Hudson, which went public 22 years ago to pursue Greenland diamonds at the direction of Jamie Tuer, its founder and former president and chief executive officer. Hudson had enough success at its Garnet Lake diamond play in western Greenland to send its stock soaring to a high of $2.41 in 2007. Unfortunately, apparent technical problems while processing a bulk sample killed the play, but Mr. Tuer's Hudson soon found new life, getting to $1.86 in 2011 on the back of its nearby Sarfartoq rare earth project.
Yes, that rare-earth bubble promptly burst and tough times returned, but Mr. Tuer again recrafted Hudson. Forget rare earths, the pitch went, Hudson's future lies with alumina at White Mountain just 40 kilometres away. Mr. Tuer pushed the project to the preliminary economic assessment stage in 2015, proposing a $184-million (U.S.) mine that would produce high-quality alumina. Or not -- he quickly refined the plan to a more manageable $40-million mine producing anorthosite and Hudson promptly began construction.
Late in 2018, Mr. Tuer crowed that the mine was nearly complete, leaving him excited to be winding up construction and "one step closer to shipping product to its customers." A few months later, Mr. Tuer was sent packing by Hudson's board, which installed Mr. Cambon in his place. (Mr. Cambon had joined the company as an adviser a decade earlier.) Hudson's stock was trading above 40 cents when Mr. Tuer left -- and in fact it averaged 42 cents over the previous six years as Mr. Tuer segued his promotion on the fly and got his mine all but operational.
Unfortunately, the tide turned against Hudson around the time of Mr. Tuer's departure. The company made its first product shipment in 2019, but the destination port was apparently unable to properly handle the high-tech product. Some of the anorthosite did get to a customer but the shipment had been contaminated upon receipt -- purportedly by fine gravel kicked up by the haulage trucks. And that was that: White Mountain needed more work, then COVID imposed new problems and by the time the smoke cleared, Hudson's 100-per-cent interest in White Mountain shrank to 31 per cent.
Now, along with the new name, comes a new beginning -- one hopes. Mr. Cambon recently conceded that Hudson's remnant interest in White Mountain has been "relinquished" so the company can focus all its efforts on the 100-per-cent-owned Gronne Berg anorthosite project. As well, it sold its Sarfartoq project to Neo Performance Materials Inc. (NEO: $6.05) for $3.5-million last year, keeping just a 5-per-cent-carried interest.
And so, Mr. Cambon and his new crew are "excited to be launching Anortech, a name that better reflects [its] goals and considerable efforts over the past 10 years" in creating green products that "have the potential to revolutionize several global markets." The company's work so far, Mr. Cambon enthuses, "has shown that anorthosite is a mineral of the future and can play a key role in making greener, more sustainable products." Therefore, he concludes, Anortech's plan is to attract global partners in key industries to further advance the applications to commercialization as quickly as possible.
Gronne Berg -- it translates to Green Mountain -- was last touted by the company in mid-2023, when samples collected late in 2022 yielded assays averaging 32.1 per cent aluminum oxide. That prompted Mr. Cambon and his crew to begin new testing, using the processing plan devised by Hudson a decade earlier for White Mountain. And so, with over $3-million in the bank and the knowledge gained from Mr. Tuer's White Mountain promotion, Anortech is back on the anorthosite bandwagon -- only the colour of the mountain has changed, it appears.