TRANSCRIPTION OF FINANCE NEWS NETWORK INTERVIEW WITH VENTURE MINERALS LIMITED (ASX:VMS), MANAGING DIRECTOR, HAMISH HALLIDAY
Clive Tompkins: Hello Clive Tompkins reporting for the Finance News Network. Joining me for the first time from Venture Minerals is Managing Director, Hamish Halliday. Hamish welcome to FNN. Can you start by introducing Venture Minerals, how long has it been going, what do you do and when did you list?
Hamish Halliday: Thanks Clive. Venture Minerals is an advanced explorer focused down in Tasmania. We’ve been listed for about three years, started acquiring ground in Tasmania in about 2005 and we’ve been fully focused on the project and consistently drilling for the last two years.
Clive Tompkins: Where’s your share price and what’s your market cap?
Hamish Halliday: Share price is thirty-six cents, market cap of about fifty million.
Clive Tompkins: And how much cash do you have and what’s your burn rate?
Hamish Halliday: We’ve got nine million in cash at the moment and we are spending about eight hundred thousand a month with four drill rigs on site.
Clive Tompkins: Turning to your project at Mount Lindsay in Tasmania, can you explain the deposit?
Hamish Halliday: Absolutely, it’s a skarn deposit; it’s heavily enriched in iron tin and tungsten. It contains a number of other commodities but has significant amounts of particularly tin and tungsten.
Clive Tompkins: Okay and what is the size of the resource?
Hamish Halliday: We’ve got Australia’s third largest tin resource of about fifty thousand tons of tin metal. We’ve got an additional fourteen thousand tons of tungsten metal, all fitting within thirty million tons of iron resources.
Clive Tompkins: And have there been any upgrades since that time?
Hamish Halliday: No we haven’t upgraded the resources and all the high grade hits that we’ve announced in the last two months in both tin and tungsten, aren’t included in those resources but they will be upgraded in the next few months.
Clive Tompkins: What sort of increase might people expect?
Hamish Halliday: We expect a substantial increase in the tin resource and probably doubling the tungsten resource.
Clive Tompkins: And what stage of development is the project at?
Hamish Halliday: We are certainly advanced exploration, we’re moving into scoping study and pre-f/s and we anticipate being into full feasibility study in mid next year.
Clive Tompkins: You’ve made an announcement today. What impact might this have on the project?
Hamish Halliday: Yeah the announcement today is pretty important for us. We’ve been following a high grade zone of tungsten that we discovered in the last couple of months and this is starting to bear some serious fruit. We’ve put five holes into it and all of them have come back with serious intersections of over one percent tungsten. Bearing in mind the average grade for deposits around the world’s tungsten is about point five.
Clive Tompkins: For those in our audience who are not familiar with tin and tungsten markets, can you bring us up to date?
Hamish Halliday: Absolutely. Strategic metals - China as they do in many of the slightly non-core metals, control the vast majority of bison tin and tungsten market. In fact in tungsten they control seventy-five percent of production. Various strategic metals and their uses, particularly tungsten, few to military applications as well as hardening tools and with China controlling seventy-five percent of the market, the western world is looking – is focusing on finding new deposits outside of China. So the market certainly is a pretty interesting one from that perspective.
Clive Tompkins: Okay and how about tin?
Hamish Halliday: Tin again - China’s the largest producer and consumer. There’s a big sort of lack of hard rock tin deposits around the world coming on stream and certainly a new discovery like this will have a significant impact on the opportunities to discover further higher grade type hard rock tin deposits.
Clive Tompkins: To progress your project you’ll need additional funding, what options are you exploring and when might an announcement be made?
Hamish Halliday: Certainly we’re exploring all options as a good junior should. We’ve got a lot of support from the capital markets. In the last few months we’ve raised eight million at twenty cents – about three months ago and we’ve certainly got a lot of interests of support going forward. So, certainly out of the capital markets we can raise the funds we need to feasibility study. Further on from that, a decision needs to be made as to a balance between whether we’ve got a high enough market cap to go it alone and do at our own plants, or whether we would partner up with somebody in the sector. We’re certainly open to either of those options.
Clive Tompkins: Last question. What makes Venture Minerals different from any number of other junior explorers?
Hamish Halliday: We’re the only one in Australia that has exposure to tin and tungsten and in fact, on a world scale, it’s pretty difficult to find a new tungsten project. They’re about - it’s about fifty times rarer in the earth’s crust than copper, so getting exposed to strategic metals certainly in ASX listed companies – is pretty hard to find and we provide exposure to both tin and tungsten and this project’s in our back yard.