Barry FitzGerald: Katanning ticks all the boxes for an Ausgold re-rate
'Garimpeiro' columnist Barry FitzGerald has covered the resources industry for 35 years. Now he's sharing the benefits of his experience with Stockhead readers.
After its dramatic rise in the opening months of the year to record levels, the Aussie gold price has settled into a bit of a groove around the $5,200/oz level.
Nothing wrong with that. It's a fantastic price and delivers fat margins to even our highest cost gold mines.
And it is not to suggest that gold can't take off again and set new highs or fall significantly for that matter.
The observation is that for the last six weeks or so the Aussie price has been as steady as it could be in these turbulent times.
It means that share prices of ASX-listed gold producers and developers have also gone into a sideways trading pattern.
Need to differentiate
So more than has been the case in recent times when gold took off to record levels, the producers and developers now need to differentiate themselves from the pack with strong newsflow of the re-rating inducing type.
It means that if the gold price continues to trade sideways, the stock involved has a reason to go higher. Alternatively, if the gold price heads south, the damage to the stock could be more limited than it would have been otherwise.
Taking all that on board, Garimpeiro had a look at his calendar during the week to find which of the gold producers/developers have re-rating event(s) on the horizon.
Ausgold stands out
Ausgold (ASX:AUC) stood out for the pending release this month of a definitive feasibility study (DFS) into the development of its Katanning gold project, a three-hour drive from Perth in WA's southwest Yilgarn region.
Katanning is one of the biggest undeveloped gold deposits in the country at 3.04 million ounces and has previously been scoped as having the potential to produce 136,000 ounces annually from open-cut ore sources for more than 10 years.
All-in sustaining costs were put at $A1,549 and preproduction capital costs weighed in at just under $300m. But those are 2023 figures and things will have changed, including the reserve component of the resource thanks to infill drilling work.
Gold prices have increased dramatically since those 2023 figures but so have construction costs. Having said that, the expectation is that the DFS will confirm Katanning as a very robust project with a super quick capex payback capability.
Take that and the scale of the project – production in the early years will be higher still because initial higher grade ores - and Ausgold's $240 million market cap at 67c share looks to be on the mean side of things.
The company has the lowest resource ounce valuation metric of its peer group for no apparent reason, except perhaps the project has been in the works since 2010 under Ausgold ownership.
So the story of the resource growth since, and the pending release of the DFS leading into a development decision by year end, has been overlooked to a large degree by the market on a fatigue basis alone.
Katanning momentum
Momentum for Katanning is now the order of the day under John Dorward, Ausgold's executive chairman who arrived on the scene in May last year.
A can-do sort of guy, Dorward was the former president and CEO of TSX-listed Roxgold, a West African gold group acquired by fellow Canadian Fortuna Silver Mines in an all-scrip deal worth $US884 million in 2021.
Two weeks in the job at Ausgold and Dorward put Katanning on the development pathway by pulling in $38 million in equity, including $1m from his own pocket.
That is being spent getting to the DFS stage and on a three-pronged strategy of establishing a bigger mining reserve component in the mineral resource estimate, extending the scale of the resource and making regional gold discoveries.
Morgans' 94c target
Morgans' veteran analyst Chris Brown has a 12-month price target on the stock of 94c.
'Our expectation is that delivery of a DFS broadly confirming or improving on the preliminary feasibility study, and employing a higher gold price, should prove positive for the share price,' Brown said.
He also flagged that a final investment decision on a project development – expected by the end of the year - should also prove positive depending on the terms of the project's financing package.
''Our valuation will likely lift with the delivery of the DFS, and again when the final investment decision is taken,'' Brown said.
The views, information, or opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the columnist and do not represent the views of Stockhead. Stockhead does not provide, endorse or otherwise assume responsibility for any financial product advice contained in this article.
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