Richard, I had dinner few months back with Jensen and I said exactly the same thing. I think that he just hate leaving stuff on the table or in the tailings. He should be taking what the refiners give, at least for few months and extract by leaching the 20% he can, for just few months, and get the show on the road.
It is possible, however, that if he did this, he could not claim full value in later dates, and be pegged on historical production. It is possible also that his technical people keep telling him, just few more experiments, just another improvement and so on. After all, put yourself in his shoes, you know what you have in the sands, you think that the solution is just over the next technical hump, you do not want to commit to large capital equipment expenditures that later you will not be using, so you wait for the best extraction method that will take out a minimu you have set in your own mind, some 80%, maybe. He cannot be bothered with impatient investors that want a feed of good news every week.
I am a strong believer in positive cash flow in the minimum time, since corporate survival depends on it. Junior mining companies, however, spend a lot of money on proving the value of a property to make sure it is minable (and they should, but Jensen already knows that his piece of real estate is minable). In some cases, these juniors also must show a clear way to the method of mining and extraction (as IPMCF, NAXOS and the other desert guys are doing), and Jensen is going the extra step of developing what he believes to be the best method of extracting the most out of his real estate. If I was on his board, I would advise a hybrid method as I have mentioned numerous time on this thread. But since I am not particularly close to Jensen, nor on his board, all I can do is vote with my money, which I have, and hope that Jensen gets his holy grail sooner than later. He'll get it for sure.
Zeev |
