Precious Metals Summit: Top industry minds reflect on surging gold price, humdrum equities
Experts predict gold, which hit an all-time high of $2,554.78 per oz. on Thursday, to be on a long-term bull run.
A shower of confetti and an electronic bell ring at the Toronto Stock Exchange Friday morning welcomed Westgold Resources (ASX: WGX; US-OTC: WGXRF; TSX: WGX) as its newest listed company.
The C$2.4 billion ($1.8 billion) market cap Westgold is now a dual-listed miner that sits among Australia’s top five producers and is the 10th-largest gold miner on the TSX by this year’s forecast production.
“Having an ASX listing and a TSX listing brings the best of both worlds together,” Westgold CEO Wayne Bramwell told The Northern Miner. “The ASX understands gold, so does the TSX, (and) having those two opportunities exposes West gold to two groups of shareholders who fundamentally believe in the commodity.”
The listing comes exactly six weeks since Westgold’s $826 million acquisition of Canada’s Karora Resources created a combined company expected to have an annual output of over 400,000 oz. of gold. The new entity also boasts ore reserves of 3.2 million oz. of gold, and resources of 13 million oz. of the metal, and holds several exploration prospects across two of Australia’s most productive gold fields.
Westgold shares were down 0.7% to C$2.59 apiece on Friday morning just hours after the market opened in Toronto.
The Aug. 2 acquisition saw Westgold take over Karora’s high-performing Australian Beta Hunt and Higginsville gold mines, located about 630 km east of Perth in Western Australia.
With reserves of 3.2 million oz, Beta Hunt is currently producing about 1.6 million tonnes per year and Westgold aims to accelerate that to 2.5 million tonnes per year, Bramwell said.
“That is for us the engine room in what we call now the southern goldfields business,” he said.
The Fletcher zone at Beta Hunt has particular exploration potential, and the company plans to pursue more drilling and resource definition in the near term.
As for Higginsville, Bramwell said it’s ripe for exploration and hasn’t been drilled for 10 to 15 years, and Westgold is ready to advance 10 strong targets at the site.
“We’re really excited about Higginsville, it was the cherry on the cake in terms of this acquisition,” he said. “We’re funded to do what we need to do.”
The company has A$165 million in cash flow, according to an Aug. 8 corporate presentation.
The Perth-headquartered miner’s listing also comes a day after gold hit $2,563 per oz., another historic high during a record-breaking year of yellow metal prices.
“For us to have (that) tailwind at a time when our production is starting to build is a fantastic result for the shareholders,” Bramwell said. “The business has got great momentum now, and the challenge for us now is to maintain that momentum and step up our production levels well above the 400,000 ounces we started with.”
The company now operates six underground mines and five processing plants across the Murchison and Southern Goldfields regions. Together, its tenure covers more than 3,200 sq. km., and its facilities have a combined processing capacity of around 6.6 million tonnes per year.
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