To All: I just got off the phone after talking with Joanna Sloane at SouthernEra. She works with Nick Sayce in their IR area. Although she has not seen the agreement yet, she was able to fill me in a bit on terms and plans.
First, DB and SUF together have a JV which will be responsible for managing operations on the Marsfontein farm, including exploring other targets and mining the M1 pipe. (I assume that DB controls the JV in fact, with 60%, but it might be a 50-50 sharing insofar as voting on operations matters is concerned, which would make me more comfortable). If I understood Joanna correctly, the JV will be putting the M1 pipe into production four weeks from now, ramping as quickly as possible to 2,000 tons per day. Once the fissures are prepared for full-scale mining in a year or so, production from the fissures would be added to the plant and the plant expanded somewhat to handle that extra production.
The terms of the marketing agreement are confidential, but Joanna said that Chris is very happy with it. Apparently, he said in a conference call for analysts yesterday that SUF is guaranteed a market for their diamonds at very favorable prices. As Confluence's source stated, the discount SUF is facing is much less than the normal one, but we will probably never know what it is (unless someone can do some forensic accounting in future SUF statements!).
I spent a considerable amount of time with Joanna reviewing SUF's news release practices. I strongly encouraged her to see if SUF could issue frequent news releases over the next 1-2 months dealing with frequently asked questions, until "we the public" have been completely brought up to date on what *we* are concerned about as SUF settles in here for production.
Joanna was open to my suggestions and is building a file of Frequently Asked Questions which SUF could address in a series of updates over the next few weeks. She is very aware of the posts to this thread and the loyalty of a number of the shareholders who post here. Therefore, we may have an opportunity to help SUF develop some modifications to their news release policies that would be of considerable assistance to "we the public" (as contrasted with other groups such as the analyst community) and increase the likelihood that SUF's stock price will accurately reflect SUF's assets and prospects in the very near future and in months and years to come.
Although Joanna will not respond on this thread, she does read it periodically. I strongly encourage anyone with questions for SUF to post those questions here (I suggest you begin with "To Joanna:" to get her attention). If you want a response from her, you need to call her at SUF directly. Either way, you can enter your questions onto her list and make your own suggestions on designing a news release policy that more actively and appropriately addresses the needs of "we the public".
As an example, I tried to get across to her that they should not put out news releases only when they have news that is "material" from a *legal* point of view. Instead, we want to see them release information more frequently, when they have news that is material from a public investor's point of view. A public investor's definition of "material" news is, of course, much broader than the legal definition. So far, it seems to me that SUF tends to release news that meets the legal definition.
Anyway, here's your chance to have a little influence.
Cheers!
Steve |
