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Gold/Mining/Energy : SOUTH AFRICAN MINING -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dave Johnson who wrote (306)	10/3/1998 9:46:00 AM
From: sea_urchin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 472

Dave : I'm not meaning to argue with an expert like Mr Blanchard, but don't always believe what you hear. I'm also not knocking Durban, which has been an excellent performer this year --- virtually rising from the grave. However, 500,000 of those ounces are from a mine which they don't yet own namely Harties. Or else from other similar, unowned, sources. I put the post up earlier. bday.co.za Harties is in the Avgold stable and I happen to be a shareholder. I VERY much doubt that Avgold will sell it. The finance for their new Target project in the Orange Free State comes from there. Target is alleged to be the richest new project in South Africa and is the dream baby of Avgold. They have staked everything they own on it. The remaining 500,000 ounces in Durban comes from old mines. In fact, VERY old mines. So, even though they may mine it now, if the POG doesn't rise to expose more marginal ore, those operations could close in a year or two. There is a big difference between a low cost, long-life, high quality mine and a high-cost, short-life, low quality mine. So, if you don't sell your Durban at the right time you might be stuck with a piece of almost worthless paper --- like many shareholders were before. Only this time there are 50,000,000 bits of paper! PS. Here's the graph of Durban on the JSE --- which, incidentally, looks very good. But, you can see the previous fall, from R65 to R7, quite clearly. office.bfanet.com