More to Metallica than heavy metal
BARRY FITZGERALD
April 28, 2010 - 10:05AM
Garimpeiro confesses to long believing that Queensland's one-stop shop in the minerals game, Metallica Minerals, was named in honour of Metallica, the ageing US heavy metal rock band responsible for the sale of more black T-shirts than AC/DC.
But he has been set straight. The company's name comes from "De re metallica," (On the nature of metals), written by the "father of mineralogy," Georg Bauer in Chemnitz , on the northern foothills of eastern Germany's Erzgebirge (ore mountain) in 1556.
A young mining engineer who went on to become president of the US, Herbert Hoover, and his geologist wife, Lou Henry Hoover, did the English speaking world a favour by translating De re metallica in 1912. That was some 14 years after Herbert spent some time in Western Australia as mine manager at the Sons of Gwalia gold mine.
That's the end of the history lesson. Garimpeiro's interest today is in the massive discount to asset value currently on offer in Metallica's share price. As mentioned above, Metallica is something of a one-stop shop for punters in the mining sector, albeit within the confines of Queensland's borders.
Its direct and indirect mining interests in the state stretch from Weipa (bauxite) in the far north to the Surat Basin (coal) in the south. In between there are nickel/cobalt, tungsten/molybdenum and copper/gold interests, much of it through listed investments.
At last count Metallica's listed interests included 56 per cent of MetroCoal (MTE), 29.9 per cent of Cape Alumina (CBX), 76 per cent of Planet Metals (PMQ) and 47 per cent of Orion Metals (ORM). On yesterday's closing prices, the portfolio was worth $52.3 million.
The two big chunks in that are MetroCoal ($28 million) and Cape Alumina ($19.2 million). Both were floated off by Metallica last year. MetroCoal has already attracted the attention of Chinese interests through a big-spending exploration joint venture. Cape Alumina has environmental opposition to overcome but is of serious to the Chinese, given the superior quality of Weipa bauxite compared with their own stuff.
Add Metallica's $8.8 million cash to its portfolio of listed investments and you get a total value for the listed interests and cash of $61.1 million. That is more than double the group's market capitalisation of $30.1 million based on its last closing price of 26.5 cents a share (and after adjusting for the pending share buyback-transfer agreement in CBX with Resource Capital Funds).
But wait, there's more. Not steak knives, but full ownership of the group's flagship project, the Norninco nickel/cobalt/scandium project northwest of Townsville. It now includes the old Greenvale laterite nickel deposits which come with a handy remnant ore position of 38 million tonnes grading 0.8 per cent nickel and associated cobalt.
Greenvale itself was mined between by Freeport and others between 1974-1992 and has the distinction of being Australia's highest grade laterite nickel project to date, with grades of more than 1.5 per cent nickel. But it was a huge loss maker for much of its history. But wrap it in with Metallica's broader interests in the Greenvale nickel belt, and Metallica's ambitions for Norninco start to look interesting.
The return of well-above historical average nickel prices is not going hurt the ambitions either. A staged development is on the cards, with initial annual production of 2900 tonnes of contained nickel and 200 tonnes of high-value the cobalt the likely starting point.
That assumes that Metallica goes it alone. The entry of a big brother already in the nickel game to move things along and on a larger scale is a real possibility. On that score, it is worth noting that an associate of China's Jilin HOROC Nonferrous Metal Group is Metallica's biggest shareholder at 18.8 per cent of the company. Not very imaginative with company names the Chinese.
MLM - Metallica Minerals LTD
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Originally Posted by laurie
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