Karl, Thanks very much for the "Veneroso" conference call. Very insightful. So insightful, in fact, that I'm taking the liberty of attempting to post it to SI so as to allow others the opportunity to read it. This will also save you the effort of continuously e-mailing it.
I have broken the article up into 3 parts (Opening Remarks, Veneroso, Q&A) - here is Part I:
CANARC CONFERENCE CALL - Part I of III
DECEMBER 9, 1997
FEATURING: FRANK VENEROSO
TOPIC: THE CURRENT TURMOIL IN THE GOLD MARKET
HOSTED BY: BRADFORD COOKE AND ROBERT CARRIERE
RC: All right, ladies and gentlemen, it is 1:15 on the West Coast of Canada and we would like to thank you for participating in this conference call with Mr. Veneroso and Bradford Cooke. We would like to bring on Mr. Cooke first of all and he will give a few statements and then introduce Mr. Veneroso. The first 20 to 25 minutes will be, of course, Mr. Veneroso and
Mr. Cooke. Thereafter you are very welcome to pose any questions so - Mr. Cooke please.
BC: All right, well, I guess I'd like to welcome everybody first of all to the Canarc conference call, I think it's very timely that we have Frank Veneroso available to speak on the current turmoil in the gold markets. Before we get into that I just wanted to have a few introductory comments, some housekeeping first: Because we're on a conference call that's
actually international, I would ask that everybody either put their mute button on or refrain from talking because we can all hear eachother. I guess that's the only housekeeping item really. I am the President of Canarc for those of you who don't know me and because of the recent action in the gold markets which impacts companies like ours, we felt it was
appropriate to hear some original comments and research from a specialist in the gold market.
I'd like to start by just saying a couple of words about Canarc's own views on the current gold market, how it impacts our Company. Basically we felt in management that there is a number of harsh new realities, not only post Bre-X but with the current price of gold and some of those realities basically are that cash and cash flow have become more important than ever. Canarc's fortunate to be a small but profitable gold producer in South America.
I think the second harsh new reality is that market financings for junior companies have all but vanished at this time and so joint ventures with major mining companies are basically back with a bang as you can see. In the last four months Canarc's been very busy on the joint venture front.
I think the last new reality post Bre-X and post low gold prices is a strong trend to quality over quantity. That is that the huge low grade capital intensive projects will tend to get back-burnered in this current gold environment in favour of smaller higher grade, and presumable higher quality, gold projects. Canarc, of course, has always believed that our main asset at Polaris being a high grade underground mine, should survive any downturn in the gold price cycle.
Last, but not least, I guess I'd like to say something about management strategy. We have been busy in the last few months negotiating joint ventures so that we can continue drilling abroad without spending our own money, but we feel fairly strongly that this is a good time to be shopping for hard assets, especially gold assets in the belief that, if we're not at bottom, we must be getting close to a bottom in the gold price cycle and that hard assets right now can literally be purchased just for pennies on the dollar. Canarc has been very busy on joint ventures with major companies. We're also very active at reviewing acquisitions and while we
haven't had any deals to announce yet, we do obviously expect to say something about our acquisitions in the New Year.
I think that's all I'm going to say and without further ado, I'd like to introduce our main speaker for today's conference call, Frank Veneroso, who is a noted financial strategist in the global markets and a specialist in gold. He has followed gold as a commodity for many years. Frank also does sell a proprietary research in the gold markets on a weekly and monthly gold service and his first annual gold book is due out in January of 1998. I think, Frank, that without further ado, I'd like you to take the floor and run with it. Frank Veneroso. |
