Heavily Discounted Gold: The Smart Way to Play the Rally
FN Media Group Presents OilPrice.com Market Commentary
LONDON, Aug. 20, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Peak gold may already be here, and the only companies sitting on promising new reserves are the junior miners. The big miners are scrambling for more gold, and merger mania has taken hold. Mentioned in today's commentary includes: Barrick Gold (NYSE: GOLD), Newmont Mining (NYSE: NEM), IAMGOLD (NYSE: IAG), AngloGold Ashanti (NYSE: AU), Royal Gold (NYSE: RGLD)
Large-cap miners are doing three things at record pace:
- They're merging with other major miners (think Newmont/Goldcorp and Barrick/Randgold)
- They're scooping up juniors sitting on the best patches of gold.
- They're conducting a series of micro deals to gradually insert themselves in the junior-mining patch. We know the juniors who have already been targeted for acquisition and micro deals, so we're looking for the next prospective beneficiary. And one company stands out ahead of the rest, African Gold Group (AGG; AGGFF).
Not only is AGG sitting on a potential 2.2-million-ounce mineral resource at its Kobada Gold Project in Mali's prolific gold-producing Birimian Greenstone Belt it's also just appointed a new CEO that will turn investor heads: Legendary mining financier Stan Bharti.
Bharti has been in Mali for over a decade already. He's proved he can turn a company around for a 20X profit. He's already done it once in this same venue. In 2008, Bharti's Forbes & Manhattan acquired Avion in Mali for $20 million, turned it around and sold it to Endeavour for $500 million in 2012. Now, he's hoping to do it again with African Gold Group (AGG; AGGFF). His timing is exquisite, too: Gold is experiencing the perfect setup.
Major miners are gunning for junior prospects. The world's central banks are hoarding gold at a record pace. Talk about the Gold Standard is no longer just fluff. And major world powers are making every effort to disengage from the US dollar. All of this has seen the world's most precious metal make prodigious runs to multi-year highs.
Senior Miners Scramble To Secure New Revenue Streams
Even supported by higher gold prices, senior miners like Barrick Gold and Newmont mining are struggling to get new gold out of the ground. That means this is a junior game for the first time in recent history, and the African Gold Group (AGG; AGGFF) news flow is putting the company in a very strong position.
Junior gold-mining ETFs are blowing things out of the water. The VanEck Vectors Junior Gold Miners ETF is up over 36% year to date.
Last year, Goldcorp Inc. Chairman Ian Tefler called peak gold, saying production had finally peaked after four decades of uninterrupted growth. Going forward, it's extended decline for the big miners. To add new gold to their portfolios, the big gold miners are entering into a phase of merger mania.
The first, and arguably most important mega-merger was Barrick Gold's (NYSE:GOLD) $18.3-billion acquisition of Randgold last year. The acquisition gave Barrick control of half of the world's Top 10 Tier One gold assets. Like many other gold companies, Barrick has had an incredible year, posting a 40 percent gain year-to-date.
That was followed this April by Newmont Mining's (NYSE:NEM) $10-billion acquisition of Goldcorp, right after Tefler called "Peak Gold". As one of the world's oldest gold miners, Newmont's acquisition was highly publicized. Though its stock fell shortly after the acquisition, it has since bounced back, climbing by 28 percent since its April low. The micro deals are also lining up, quickly.
Take Royal Gold (NYSE:RGLD), for instance. As a major player in the acquisition market, the company is making significant moves in 2019, and it's paying off. The Denver-based company has a large reach, with claims on multiple precious metals operations across nearly two dozen companies. Royal Gold has already climbed nearly 48 percent year-to-date and it's showing no signs of slowing.
Gold stocks are outperforming the equities market, and it's never been a better time to buy gold. Stan Bharti knows this well: That's why he's behind African Gold Group (AGG; AGGFF).
He also knows that not all junior gold stocks will come out of this a winner. He's targeting AGG for low-cost production and undervalued assets that are likely to yield higher returns.
Miners Are Looking For Low-Cost Production
Mali is the third-largest producer of gold in all of Africa, and the Birimian Greenstone Belt—the home of Africa Gold Group's Kobada Project—is the motherlode of African gold with a long history of mining that dates back to the 19th Century. It's a massive belt the spans 350,000 square kilometers of world-class gold deposits stretching across Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire.
Other gold producers such as IAMGOLD (NYSE:IAG) and AngloGold Ashanti (NYSE:AU) have already established successful projects in the region, including the joint venture between the two companies, the Sadiola Gold Mine, which accounts for 10 percent of IAMGOLD's total production.
The mine has consistently produced hundreds of thousands of ounces since the beginning of the 2000s and is likely to keep producing for the foreseeable future. Further exploration in the surrounding areas is already under way, and new projects are already in the development stage.
IAMGOLD and AngloGold's success is also a positive sign for African Gold Group (AGG; AGGFF), which is situated right in the middle of this resource-rich gold belt.
The brilliant part here is that the mine holds a total resource of a whopping 2.2 million ounces. Even more brilliant: The Kobada project is a huge part of this. It's 4 kilometers long and 12 kilometers wide and African Gold Group owns the entire license. From a geological perspective, AGG could end up tripling its resource here.
It's got three zones right nearby the already proven-up 2.2 million ounces in mineral resources—and it's all easy to drill because it's all right near the surface. The deepest hole AGG's had to drill so far has been only 300 meters.
A 2016 feasibility study has already demonstrated that Kobada is simple to mine on a technical level, and that's music to investor ears. This is an open pit operation with gravity separation and leach. That means it will be a low-cost, scalable, free dig.
AGG puts average LOM cash operating costs at $557/Oz Au, exclusive of royalties, and all-in LOM sustaining cash operating costs at $788/Oz Au.
The Price Is Right
The economics are just what large-cap miners, and investors, are looking for: high early cash flows from starter pits and a post-tax IRR of 43%, based on $1200 gold, or 55% based on $1400 gold. With a planned $45.4-million pre-production capital cost, African Gold Group is targeting a 1.5-year payback from the start of commercial production, and full payback in only 2.5 years.
The 2016 feasibility study shows that AGG can produce 50,000 ounces of gold a year and build that to 100,000 ounces a year. All for under $50 million. There are a lot of great projects out there, but many of them don't see the light of day because they need billions in funding to get them off the ground. That's not the case with Kobada.
Teams That Make A Difference
When it comes to gold miner profiles, it's hard to beat Stan Bharti, who just took the lead for African Gold Group (AGG; AGGFF).
Not only is he an engineer, international financier and seasoned entrepreneur who has brought in $3 billion in investment capital for the companies he's worked with, but he's also been behind dozens of turn-around success stories—including in Mali. And the Kobada Project is the perfect setup for Bharti's Toronto-based Forbes & Manhattan.
The litmus test for the ideal distressed gold asset is lots of gold in the ground, plus a substandard management team. For Bharti and F&M, Kobada represented the next big turnaround.
Why?
- It already had a feasibility study with a resource of 2 million ounces that was going to be easy to mine.
- It was in one of the most prolific gold belts in Africa
- The previous management wasn't able to deliver
F&M took it over and brought on a new board, including Stan Bharti as Chairman, President & CEO. Now it's time to get to that gold. Bharti's track record on turnarounds speaks for itself, but there are other AGG board members and managers to be excited about here, as well:
Sir Sam Jonah is the former CEO of Anglo Gold Ashanti, one of the two major gold companies operating in Africa in the 1990s, and one of the most highly respected African gold veterans on the planet—and elsewhere, too: He's been knighted by the Queen of England. There's also Bruce Humphrey, former COO of giant Goldcorp, the second-largest gold company in the world. John Begeman, the CEO of Avion—the Mali-based gold company that he and Bharti built up from $20 million to $500 million.
These aren't just board members—they're operational legacies.
AGG also has a full local management team on the site with a very connected and powerful country manager when it comes to obtaining permits. And now, AGG can boast another big name: Daniel Callow, a 12-year veteran for trading/mining giant Glencore's African copper operations, whose just been made African Gold Group's COO.
To recap:
We're looking at a production starting point of 50,000 ounces per year. But that's just the beginning. AGG is evaluating the potential for an increase in estimated annual production to 100,000 ounces per year. Now, the news flow may change to the gold itself because they're targeting a completion date of December 2019 for an evaluation for 100,000 ounces per year.
This is potentially one of the best discount gold stories of recent times. AGG's proved up resources of 2.2 million ounces alone are worth billions in revenue at today's soaring gold prices. They're worth billions even at yesterday's prices.
And that 2.2 million ounces of mineral reserves is only what's been proved up so far. This is a 4 kilometer-long and 12-kilometer wide stretch of prime gold that could contain triple the resources.
But what makes the company potentially worth even more is the fact that the big miners are on the hunt for just this type of junior they hope can replenish their declining reserves in the only way possible.
By. Ian Jenkins
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