MSV, Minco silver
Executives
Mark Orsmond - VP of Corporate Development
Presentation
Mark Orsmond
Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen and all those present on the web, thank you for having us. We're Minco Silver. Today I would like to introduce a story that was actually very much culminated out of very recently some heavy input from analysts. And this presentation will go to show what happens when you actually get analysts involved to advise you and guide you, and certainly things have changed dramatically for our company in the last few months.
So without further ado and drawing your attention to the forward-looking statements and cautionary therein, I'd like to introduce the management team. Our Chairman is William Meyer, who was the Former VP Exploration of the Teck Corporation. President and Chief Operating Officer is Dr. Ken Cai. He is the Queen's geologist. He has 20 years worth of experience working in mineral exploration and evaluation of properties in China.
Prior to this, he worked for the Chinese government assessing strategic deposits that were important to the Chinese in a time where China needed bullion, particularly sliver and gold, to actually make up some of their trading. So that has certainly changed. And Minco Silver has come and benefited tremendously from the relationships that Ken had in China.
Myself, I'm an accountant, but I do get provision of going on the road and telling the story and all. And our Chief Financial Officer is Matthew Kavanagh. We do expect another management member of the team to join, which is a mine builder. We have been in discussions with him and hope the news releases will be released shortly that he has accepted the position.
Our head office is in Vancouver. We got two offices in Beijing and Guangzhou, which are the subsidiary offices, satellite offices. Our key project is a Fuwan Project. We listed at -- on December 2nd, 2005 approximately 13, 14 months ago at an IPO price of $1.25. We hit a high of about $4.20 and we settled in the $2.75 range.
We recently completed a $16 million financing, which was led by CIBC World Markets, Sprott and Canaccord. The -- that financing to a large degree was as a result of the inputs from analysts and from what we felt needed to happen to take this to the next level. I'll elaborate on this further.
Market capitalization is $85 million. We have a working capital now in the bank of $21 in million shares. Minco Mining is the holding company, which earns 45.4% of Minco Silver and Silver Standard Resources is 15.65%. I must point out that Bob Quartermain is on our Board and is a very, very strong and instrumental driving force in our company. We're very pleased to have him.
China, just for those who aren't aware of how China has expanded and grown, which probably is absolutely no one, huge population, huge GDP growth. And I'm not going to go into the fact that they have been so instrumental in the commodities boom. However, from a political risk assessment of China, China's mining sector only presents a small fraction of its actual economy.
So therefore, in actual fact we often get called upon what about repatriation of assets, what about projects, et cetera. Well, considering that in some countries you know it's as high as 50% or 60% of their GDP, I believe it's less than 1% in China. So it's not instrumental to them at all the mining. China has become a manufacturing entity, supply chain logistics as the manufacturer of the world.
What does excite us about China is the new laws which they have instituted regarding the trading, especially the foreign -- direct foreign investments, and the ability for mining companies to pick up properties in China and to work with them and to profit from them. To give you an indication of this, the foreign investment in mining, mineral and properties went from 19 properties in 1999 to over 1,500 in November 2005.
Recently, they joined the World Trade Treaty Organization and in repelling lot of their old uptake mining laws the institute of a new sets of laws likely mimicking -- very closely mimicking, the Canadian set of mining laws. They simultaneously instituted a very favorable tax savings for mining companies.
And it works as such. Year one to three, there is no tax. Year four and five, there is 50% of the corporate tax rate, whichever province you are in. That tax rate varies. We are at a tax rate where it is 33% on Fuwan property, which is in the Guangzhou Province. This tax holiday only kicks in from the first year of profitable operations.
The fundamentals of silver are again very, very positive. Again, we have seen as a result to a large degree the shortfall in silver had been made up by mixed sales from governments of their reserves. At one stage it was reputed that China had a quarter of the world silver as a result of earlier trade, where they were trading silk for , and basically they have monetized silver as their money. So as they have been a net seller for all these years, we believe that those supplies are running up.
And what is fantastic about silver is the industrial demand, which we see more patents registered in silver alone than all other metals combined, for new uses in RF -- radio frequency technologies, RFID technologies, biotech, biomedical, the uses are endless. So there is a strong industrial demand for silver, but what the excitement which we're seeing is the investment demand for silver.
And recently, if you have a look at the 100 million ounces that was launched by the ETF by Barclays Bank, which was fully subscribed for and now is complete, and now there is a plan for another 100 million ounces, we see there is a real value, a real term conscious value of putting money back into silver as an investment commodity as well.
Some of the analyst and some of the commentators which I respect such as David Morgan and David Barn certainly have very bullish outlook prices for silver. And some of them have made comments, which rivaled the price of palladium. So I won't elaborate on that.
But the net result is we are fairly confident that if you have a look at the price which has gone from around $4, $5 to $13, and I believe its $14 at the momentum, some of the analysts' projections, I think TD Waterhouse was at $0.27 to be correct. But I think that’s what it was. And David Morgan I think was at $17.50 for the end of the year.
Just going into China, China is largely untapped. Now, to a large degree, the mining that has taken place in China has been low-tech high-labor component mines where you have thousands of workers earning wages, using very low technologies to extract minerals and metals.
We have found the deposits, which is amenable to a large-scale mining operation. And that’s indeed what we intend to fill, as we fast track our project to production. Recently we have seen some companies benefit tremendously from being in China by getting their mining licenses and Sino Gold, Afcan Mining, Silvercorp Metals, have all now path leaders who have gone ahead and certainly are paving the way for us and making it a lot easier.
We are no longer the first to attempt this. It’s been done. It’s been awarded. And it’s been awarded very successfully.
When we get analysts on the property, things change. And in October, what we had done is predominantly we were being controlled in on by Minco Mining and Minco Silver with a small retail [fledge]. We hosted a trip of analysts, which included CIBC, Sprott and some other fairly significant guys. And they got to, you know, Fuwan property. And when they saw our Fuwan property, they were astounded by our lack of vision
And when I say lack of vision, it’s -- this company had wanted to go completely full speed ahead into bringing its Fuwan deposits into production. When you have a look at the triangle, which is that -- sorry the rectangle, the red rectangular Fuwan deposits, that is part of the Fuwan silver belt. That represents about 2.8 kilometers
The full belt is actually 10 kilometers. When we purchased the project from the Chinese, we got a whole bunch of data, actually 50,000 soil anomalies and number of holes, basically which had been drilled on particularly this one deposit, but also the Dieping deposit and also work had been done across the whole belt.
We elected at the time to put the Fuwan deposit into production as soon as possible. We did shut our drilling and we got a 43-101 complaint report on the Fuwan deposits alone.
When the analysts got there, they had a look at this. And I said wait a minute, you guys should tell the market that you have up to 300, 400 million ounces along this entire belt of this mineralization extends. And wherever we have done step-out drilling, we have actually hit.
So this a story of how that analyst tour was immediately proceeded a few weeks later by 60.5 million -- $16.25 million financing institutionally-lead, which was closed with the top tier institutions in Toronto.
If you have the look on the left hand side, you will see our entire land package, which constitutes three main license areas. The Fuwan deposit is one of those small areas. I have been told not to lead here, and I don’t know how to point. But in the top rectangle, you will see two smaller rectangles. And the Fuwan deposit is one of those deposits.
So we have a tremendously exciting story to tell spurred by analysts. And I am going to jump in this presentation around a little bit. I am going to go to page 18, which is basically a preliminary development schedule. In this preliminary development schedule, what we have shown here is the promises which we have made the market and what we said we would in the coming year.
So the first thing which we have to do is we have to drill. We have to release the results of our drilling. And last year, we did a combined 16,509 meters of drilling. By the time the analysts got on the property and preceding the financing, we had completed 8,500 meters of drilling.
Those results were released to the market, as on page up, you can see that the grades that we are getting on the bottom right-hand side are fairly high, in fact much higher than the grades that our 43-101 has been. The average grade of 43-101 is 185 grams per ton.
So those results of the first 8,500 meters are going to be released in resource calculation, which we promise the market in Q1 of 2007. Then what we did is we had to bring more drills on to the property, which we did. And we’ve now about eight drills working full time on the property.
Those 8 drills completed a further 8,000 meters of drilling. So the next thing which we intend to do is release the results of those drilling over the next few weeks as we get the assets back.
The other promise which we made the market is that we would be completing a scoping study. The scoping study would -- we have -- we released the news release about 2 weeks ago, indicating that we’re already halfway complete in the scoping study. That scoping study we have to release at Q1. As well send timeline to then commence our feasibility study.
The money we raised predominantly was to pay for the scoping study, feasibility study and give us enough of a runway to get to the mine financing, which is -- we estimate back of the envelope calculations around 80 million. I will go now back to where we were, on the silver belt.
If you have a look, we have got some fantastic infrastructure surrounding our deposits. That rectangular Fuwan deposit is physically that ridge that you see over there. And if you stand on the ridge and look back, you will see the town of Fuwan with an estimated population of 30,000 people, a power plant, paved roads, highways. That eliminates a $100 million worth of capital out of expense budget, if you wanted to put that all in and it was in a remote area. So we are very fortunate to have this situation.
In our deposits, you can see that we have six distinct zones. And I will be showing a flyby, a 3D model of our deposits. But zone one is the initial mining area. The reason why this deposit is intact today is because it’s under the mountain. And this slide is [citing] correct. It doesn’t actually touch the surface there.
If it had to touch the surface, that silver would have been depleted. It would have been taken over and illegally mined such as the gold was on our gold property, which is -- on Minco Gold’s property, which is adjacent to the silver property.
Here is the flyby. I will talk you through some of it. After a long flight to China, you will eventually come to Hong Kong and from Hong Kong to Guangzhou is a train ride, of about an hour and 20 minutes and things change when you leave the Hong Kong border to Guangzhou.
Then you get in a car and you drive to Gaoming which is on a four-lane highway which is, there is not an inch of land available for development because it's all been taken up industrially, the growth is tremendous in this area. That takes about a two-hour trip to Gaoming, and Gaoming has got about 100,000 people in, and if any of the analyst wish to come and see our property, he will stay at the Hengwei Hotel there and they serve good Chinese food.
And Fuwan Township is the local township near our property, we have a small office there, and here is our deposits, the Fuwan Deposits. Naturally as you can see that we have now highlighted the potential of the entire Silver belt because the promise made is that, we would spend 20% of exploration budget this year on proving out that belt.
If you go under the deposit, you'll see a very shallow line deposits its caught between a lime and a sandstone, it is very easy mineable, easy mineable. We envisaging an underground mine situation probably a room in color technology or preliminary, obviously, my comment to this stage.
As we finish our mining plan in the study. But if you have a look, it's about 5 to 6 meters deep -- wide -- sorry -- at depth and we've got about a 100 meters wide. The search continues and wherever we've drilled, we've continued hitting of 65 holes we drilled last year, only one didn't hit mineralization.
Chinese had drilled about 40 holes prior to us, so we've got now about a 105 holes that have been drilled in this main deposit area. A concept for mining plans. Now I am going stop this, if I can. The slide you are about to see is the soil anomalies and 50,000 soil anomalies were taken over the entire Silver Fuwan belt, which indicates to us that the mineralization extends in higher length of the 10 kilometers.
Now if this is indeed correct, and we've got a 113 million ounces what the Chinese gave we have done infill drilling, we've received higher grade, we have resource upgrades of Fuwan deposit increases and we go and drill this up and in some cases just shut a drill, the holes that the Chinese have already drilled.
We could have one of world's top 10 silver projects, which would be incredibly exciting or continues along strike and that would definitely be what the analyst saw. And that’s probably not as pretty much as its production that’s being sold to a major. I believe Western Silver had around 300 million ounces units we sold at a lower grade and I think that we put around $20 a share. So tremendous opportunity and what we are going to be doing, is spending 20% of our resource budget now, going in and proving up the belt.
Here is our 43-101 as you can see the average grade of silver, at the bottom is 185 grams per ton. In November when we did the result calculation, we have equivalency, silver equivalency from the lead and zinc credits in around another 20 million ounces of silver equivalency, so that will take us to about another 130 million ounces as we stand today.
Another important thing and why we’re so excited about China, is the low cost of mining in China. Everything that you move are made to be in China cost less. The average cost to the salaried worker on our staff receives $200 US a month. That will change and that’s changing fast. But certainly for the foreseeable future, we can take advantage of that.
On our infrastructure this stock is adjacent to our property. We have nearby smelters where we will on ship concentrate. We have such rampant development and construction going on in Guangzhou that the rock, waste rock has been sold out by the developers to buy the $2.50 per ton. We have a favorable detect scheme. And that preliminary metallurgical protests indicate that we got fantastic recoveries of the silver, lead and the zinc.
So this will make for the opportunities to be a really, really low cash cost provider. Part of our financing residue, a lot of bank of the envelope calculations within independent, preparing an economic model and at a very, very hard conceptual scale we’re hoping to eventually have 5000 ton a day mine, producing 10 million ounces and with an oil and cash cost of about 24.50 per ton, which makes a very profitable mine.
And I’ve gone through, for those who would like to know more on the drilling zone and the drillings plan and what we are doing, we can -- I can answer those questions afterwards. But as you can see, a lot of our drill results are returning much higher grades that was -- than we previously had in our 43-101.
Our prominent, our development schedule, I’ll go back to this again. So just to label, de-label the point we have 8500 meters we have drilled, it will be coming out in resource study and at the end of Q1, 2007. We got a further 8000 meters, which we’ve drilled, but the results haven’t been released yet. We got a scoping study to be released at the end of Q1 2007. And we will start our feasibility study.
Our feasibility study from the above slide you can see its three months shorter in China. Its not that we’re doing two feasibility studies we’re doing one. However, we are able to fast track the project into production within three months, by three months, because the Chinese have a lesser standard from the safety requirements and environment requirements.
Nevertheless, we still intend to deal with the most stringent, safety, and environmental standards and our full feasibility study on the mine will be constructed on the first class world Canadian mine. The Chinese are excited about this, having this technology come to their region and seeing this mine, would be of tremendous benefit, we have fantastic relationships with them.
We expect the mine permitting to start therefore, and mine construction and development as well really in the beginning of end of -- sorry the beginning of Q1 in 2008. And we expect to be in commercial production in Q4 of 2009. So why do you buy our stock? And that's probably the most important thing.
Firstly, if you had to look at our market cap plants in the ground this was as of 1st of November 2006. We had $0.57 in the ground that excluded the financing, the $16 million that actually push it to about $0.65 I believe. But nevertheless we were one of the lowest. The average cost paid for Silver was $2.40 per ounce and we are again receiving $0.57.
This was based on the 113 million ounces, if indeed our resource calculation is correct and we do have some an increase in our resource and the Fuwan belt comes up to what we think the potential could be in the region of 300 or 400 million of exploration ounces. If that is indeed correct, and we just stayed at the lowest. Our share costs with 30 million shares outstanding should excel in this coming year. We have got the developing schedule planned. We've got the road in progress.
The next step for us is to get some analyst coverage and to work with some analysts to take us to market. We are in discussion with quite a few groups about this, they have expressed interest. And we are hoping that we will receive coverage sometime this year and be on a road show with them.
Then actually another important point is, a lot of people ask about the risk in China, the political risk. When we can insure the political risk to the mega division of the World Bank to preliminary discussions indicating would be as lot as $35,000 to ensure the repatriation of a mind. So that indicates that the World Bank themselves sees China as a very, very low risk from repatriation with political and stability.
Over here you can see appendix side, the market kept for ounces. And we've stood this up between senior produces, emerging Silver products, and silver development companies. Again, we one of the lowest branches in the sliver development companies and potentially had a fantastic, fantastic resource.
If you have a look or read one of the reports which was written by a Silver bulls called David Bond. He wrote the report about Minco Silver and he compared Minco Silver to Silver Cope, the report is called where he is – the letter that he wrote is called the last train to China.
He say's five times two equals ten, and two times five equals ten, and he then takes Silver Cope property and our property and he discusses the merits. The difference which we like to point out is that we had $85 million and they are several $100 million. So we acknowledge they are ahead of us. And what we're looking to do is now catch up to them. And we think they have done a tremendous job paving the way and we have to follow-up in there success.
That completes my presentation if there is any questions please feel free to ask.
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