TRANSCRIPTION OF FINANCE NEWS NETWORK INTERVIEW WITH HORSESHOE METALS LIMITED (ASX:HOR) MANAGING DIRECTOR, NEIL MARSTONDavid Taylor: Hello David Taylor reporting for the Finance News Network. We’re coming to you today from the Esplanade Hotel in Fremantle Perth, they’re the hosts of the Explorers Conference and joining me now is the Managing Director of Horseshoe Metals, Mr. Neil Marston.
Neil thank you for your time today, let’s just begin by giving us a brief overview of Horseshoe Metals.
Neil Marston: Sure Dave, Horseshoe Metals was listed on the Stock Exchange in July last year and we raised $7 million as part of the IPO process, and our major assets are two exploration projects. One’s called the Horseshoe Lights Project and the other the Kumarina Project; they’re both located in Western Australia about 150 kilometres north of Meekatharra in central Western Australia.
David Taylor: So how are you performing now on the Stock Market and what’s the market capitalisation of Horseshoe?
Neil Marston: Sure, okay we listed on a 20 cent share. For the first six months we were trading in that 20 to 30 cent price range and when we released some results in January, our share price moved from 22 cents up to 64 cents in one day, which we’re very happy about. Yes we’re very happy about that, so share price is sitting at mid 50s at the moment which gives us a market cap of about $30 million.
David Taylor: Now you have two projects north of Meekatharra in central Western Australia, let’s just examine those two closely. Let’s start with Horseshoe Lights, can you tell us a little bit about that project?
Neil Marston: Sure, okay well Horseshoe Lights we’ve been focusing on the old Horseshoe Lights mine within our project area. It’s a VMS style deposit which was in production until 1994; it’s got a copper resource of about 48,000 tonnes of copper metal from the data base we’ve acquired. So after listing, we went out and started our first drilling programme in August.
We were basically testing northern extensions of the resource to the north of the pit; we came up with some reasonable numbers particularly in one hole where we came up with 14 metres at 2.2% copper. So in the second programme which we completed in November, we went back and put some holes around that hole, two holes in particular were very good. One came up with 14 metres at 3.7% copper including 1 metre at 17% and then the hole below that came up with 15 metres at 5.1%, including 3 metres at 11.8% copper.
So basically when you stack those three holes together, we basically delineated a zone of copper mineralisation below where there was a historical hole. We’re basically down to about 150 metres below ground level now, from about 60 metres where the first contact was.
David Taylor: So you describe that as good progress?
Neil Marston: Yes, look we’re very happy with that because the drillings in an area – basically we’ve drilled about 100 metres north of where the last line of drilling was. So we’ve extended the – we’ve confirmed that that mineralised stringer zone that we’ve been testing, extends 100 metres or so to the north. It’s opened beyond that and it’s also opened down dip, so we’ll be going back down there in our next programme and testing the results we’ve found.
David Taylor: Now there’ll be further drilling in March for Horseshoe Lights, when will that drilling commence and when will it finish?
Neil Marston: Yeah look, we’re aiming to start in mid March. There’s been a lot of rain up there in the last couple of weeks which may hold up our programme, but we are planning to start in March and finish that programme in April, and then get the assay results back as soon as we can after that.
David Taylor: On to Kumarina can you give us an idea of the size of that project?
Neil Marston: Sure, we’ve got a full size Exploration Licence granted at Kumarina in October last year. So that’s about 217 square kilometres of ground we’ve got, and we’re just about to start an aeromag survey over the entire exploration licence area. That’ll be a very low level survey done, 100 metre line spacing, so we’ll get good resolution with that survey and that’ll allow us to see the structures more clearly than we have to date, and help us target our drilling at Kumarina.
David Taylor: Now in terms of your financial position, you raised $7 million in an IPO in the middle of last year, have you got any financing plans for this year?
Neil Marston: It wasn’t part of our initial plan, but if we gain some momentum with this next drilling programme we’ll start, we’ll need to gear up our activities which will obviously affect our expenditure rate. So if everything goes successful in the next drilling programme, I’d expect we may do a raising later this year and bring in some keystone partners potentially.
David Taylor: And in terms of your shareholder registry, are you backed by any brokers at the moment?
Neil Marston: We don’t have any formal broker coverage at the moment. We’ve had a lot of interest from most of the senior brokers and most of them have been actively trading our stock since our announcement in January. So we’re very happy that we’ve attracted the attention of the market. Going forward we may tie up with a particular broker and continue a relationship including capital raising.
David Taylor: So in your wrapping it all up, where do you see Horseshoe Metals at the end of this year?
Neil Marston: We’ll be advancing the Horseshoe Project towards bringing it back into production as it once was and Kumarina is the blue sky for us. If we have a couple of interesting hits there and there is a lot of targets for us to go and test, well then who knows what that will produce.
So there’s a bit of blue sky with Kumarina and Horseshoe’s our flagship which we will try and advance as quickly as we can.
David Taylor: Neil Marston thank you very much for your time today.
Neil Marston: No worries David, thank you.
ENDS
