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Gold miners burned by bad deals are again rushing to M&A
By Kevin Crowley
Bloomberg News
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
It's been a dirty word in the gold-mining industry for the last three years, but now companies can't stop saying it: growth.
Top executives are on the hunt for mergers and acquisitions, and focusing on exploration as the industry emerges from survival mode. Gold prices have recovered and cost cuts are taking effect, delivering profits for companies that need to remedy a shortage of new discoveries and declining reserves.
The trouble is that they have a bad history when it comes to dealmaking. In the China-led commodity boom, the entire mining industry spent heavily on deals and big projects that soured when metals prices later collapsed. Companies wrote off close to $100 billion between 2011 and 2016, according to analysts at Investec Ltd.
Gold producers say this time will be different, but the losses generated by a decade of wasteful spending during the bull market to 2011 are still fresh in investors' memories. While th gained 7.6 percent this year to $1,234.30 an ounce, that's still much lower than the record of more than $1,900 set five years ago.
"All of us have got one issue and that's we haven't much exploration in the last 10 years, and all our assets' lives are getting shorter," Peter Steenkamp, chief executive officer of Harmony Gold Mining Co., said in an interview at the Mining Indaba conference in Cape Town. "Everybody is looking to replace the ounces that they're mining." ...
... For the remainder of the report:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-08/gold-miners-burned-by...
K92 Mining Drills Multiple High-Grade Gold Intersections
Company Announcement
Friday, January 27, 2017
K92 Mining Inc. (TSXV–KNT) announces the latest results from the ongoing grade control drilling program at its high-grade Kainantu Gold Mine in Papua New Guinea. K92 is ramping up the Kainantu gold mine toward commercial production, with its longest continuous production run to date now commenced.
In September 2016 K92 began a campaign of close-spaced underground diamond drilling as part of a comprehensive grade-control strategy. The current grade-control drilling program is focused on the areas of Irumafimpa and is designed to bring a high degree of confidence to the production planning and scheduling. K92 plans to mine this area in the coming six months. The closed-space drilling pattern of approximately 15 metres by 15 meters has significantly increased the confidence in this sparsely drilled area, with most holes recording high-grade intersections. Approximately 80 percent of the holes completed to date have recorded multiple high-grade intersections indicating the presence of multiple parallel to sub parallel high-grade veins. ...
... For the remainder of the announcement:
http://www.k92mining.com/2017/01/k92-drills-multiple-high-grade-gold-int...
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