I'v read the PR several times now, and it's just as unclear and poorly written as previous ones. The only things that are clear are that they have been running at poor recovery rates for quite a while, and that they are just now getting around to addressing it (and telling us about it).
Once again, numbers are given in terms of overall PMs, rather than broken down into separate gold and silver numbers. 15-25% recovery of PMs? Is that 25% recovery of gold and 25% recovery of silver? Or two different values that average out to 25% of the total weight of PMs? Who knows? Certainly nobody reading this PR. I was under the impression that recovery was optimized for gold, and that the processed material was being stockpiled for later recovery of silver. But who knows?
And 30+ thousand tons of ore that will have to be processed again? What kind of garbage is that? Why wait so long to do something about it? CQ should not only be replaced on the board, he should also be booted out as mill manager. Enough with nepotism putting incompetent relatives not just on the payroll but in charge of critical operations for which they have no qualifications. Get an experienced mill manager in there to straighten things out. The present situation is inexcusable, especially after over 2 years of operation. Most companies allot 6 months to get a mill operating at peak efficiency.
The cyanide process is pretty standard in the industry and can be used safely, nevertheless they better damn well have someone with experience in that process to oversee it. I seriously doubt that CQ has that experience.
As for the numbers they give in the table, notice that those are projected numbers after the cyanide circuit is added. We still don't have any numbers for what they have actually been doing. We can guess, but dammit we shouldn't have to. Some may consider this an attempt at transparency, but to me it only confirms how little they have been telling us and how long they have waited to tell us the important stuff.
I was expecting some reasonable numbers in the 10K, now I'm not so sure. I hear they only got a couple of smaller shipments out before the end of the year, so revenue will be less than it could have been. Given the recovery rates they are operating at now, even the numbers for this quarter, which we won't know for another 2 1/2 months unless they get the vault finished, may not be anywhere near expected. The only thing that might help is that they had a lot of concentrate stockpiled from 2 years of milling- even at 15-25% recovery that might produce some reasonable revenue if they can smelt it quickly enough. But then what? How long to put this new circuit in? And optimize the mill? And even then only expect recovery of 83% of the gold and 57% of the silver? This is nonsense. And I'll say again that the excuse of "security" doesn't work as a reason not to tell us how much money they have received.
All of this does indeed emphasize how important it is to drill, get great results, and bring in experienced people to run this operation, either as the result of a buyout or financing (JV?) arrangement.
