Gold deals are talk of the town at mining's annual gabfest
The annual three-day event has attracted 2500 attendees to the historic city in Western Australia's Goldfields region, with miners keen to talk up their prospects to investors and analysts.
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West Australian
13 hours ago
- West Australian
Diggers & Dealers 2025: De Grey Mining snags Deal of the Year for $5 billion Hemi sale
The blockbuster $5 billion sale of the Hemi gold deposit in the Pilbara to Northern Star Resources has earned De Grey Mining the Dealer of the Year award. The prized gold miner was acquired by Northern Star Resources officially in May, in a transaction that handed WA's Super Pit miner the keys to the country's next major yellow metal mine amid record prices. The judges said De Grey's substantial growth from making the game-changing discovery at Hemi in 2019 to the sale six years on 'exemplifies all that makes our industry great.' Gold's winning streak was also reflected in the Digger of the Year Award, which went to listed mid-tier Ramelius Resources. The Mark Zeptner-led gold miner has managed to deliver on its promised production and cost guidance targets or five years in a row. Meanwhile, the GJ Stokes Memorial Award was given to Peter Cook, a geologist and mining company director. Diggers chair Jim Walker said Mr Cook was 'probably better known as a hard-nosed operator than a corporate executive' and credited him as a 'renovator' who had fixed and rebuilt projects that struggled to get off the ground. The 2025 Emerging Company Award went to yellow metal explorer Turaco Gold. The $520m market capitalised Turaco bought the Afema Gold Project in Cote d'Ivoire in early 2024, and has been tipped as an advancing new mid-tier gold producer in the region. All the awards were dished out at the 34th annual Diggers & Dealers gala dinner on Wednesday night.
News.com.au
20 hours ago
- News.com.au
Diggers and Dealers: Tim Hoff looks for more winners with his 2025 Diggers portfolio
Each year we catch up with Canaccord Genuity mining analyst Tim Hoff at Diggers and Dealers in Kalgoorlie to get his best ideas for the year ahead. Check out where he's looking for value in 2025. After an enormously successful 2023 instalment, Canaccord's Tim Hoff has had reason to be chirpy about his Diggers and Dealers stock selections. Powered by market darlings Spartan Resources (ASX:SPR) and Azure Minerals (ASX:AZS), a $10,000 investment in August 2023 would have netted $21,600 by last year's conference. Last year, Hoff correctly predicted small cap punting would be a harder task in turbulent markets. Spreading himself thinner across 13 small cap names, a 105% 12-month lift in copper explorer Prospect Resources (ASX:PSC) and 95% gain for South American silver stacker Andean Silver (ASX:ASL) proved the standouts of a kaleidoscopic mix of speculative names. All up the gains and losses of a hypothetical 'Hoff Diggers portfolio' would have evened out to 10.85% on the year. "Look last year we were sitting here and we thought it would be difficult," he said. "And honestly I hadn't looked at the numbers until today and I was fairly surprised to see that the portfolio, the ideas that we came through with on average were up. "When we break down some of the trends within that, you can see some of the exploration plays had a hard time. "That is the nature of exploration and greenfields exploration. You can see gold and precious metals benefited from positive commodity pricing, so that that really flowed through. And then the base metals where we were a little bit split between the names we had there, we had a couple of winners and a couple of losers. "When we take a step back, I feel like the year panned out roughly how we were thinking." Another $10,000 investment would have taken the hypothetical portfolio to $11,085, or if Hoff's take from 2023 were compounded, a $23,944 pool would be sitting there to take off the table or go again. So what is Tim Hoff eyeing this time around? Looking for discoveries The big thing Hoffy is looking for is small caps with the potential to make a discovery. That's getting easier in the gold space, where record prices are stirring rising valuations, with exploration budgets lifting as capital raises become easier and less dilutive. But it's a double-edged sword. Hoff is looking for stocks that can go multiple times, and a number of gold names are already running hard. And it's not just the now heavily covered gold sector where discoveries and rerates are on the cards. "Obviously we had Trump come through in November, and that's set a whole series of events in place like the bull run in gold pricing, with the rare earths sector certainly performing very well on the back of that. "And so there's always something happening in this market and pockets of interest." Hoff's 2025 Diggers portfolio Prospect Resources (ASX:PSC) Prospect is the only repeat entry in this year's picks from the Canaccord number cruncher. It owns the Mumbezhi project in Zambia, where Prospect has already outlined one of the largest undeveloped copper deposits on the ASX with over 500,000t of copper metal at grades of 0.5% Cu. That puts it right in the wheelhouse of neighbour First Quantum Minerals, which picked up a 15% stake in the junior this year as questions circle the long-term future of its nearby Sentinel mine. Hoff is doubling down even after a ripping 12-month run. "This is a coverage stock that I have on take-out watch. Right next door to their project in Zambia, you have 60 million tonnes of processing capacity. " It's owned by First Quantum. In 2029, the grade falls from 0.5% to 0.3%, and 2034 they run out of ore. You've got billions of dollars of sunk cost infrastructure there. And having that sit idle is not a tenable situation for a company like First Quantum. "So we think they'll get taken out. And if they don't we think that the project and the deposit has the potential to seriously grow tonnes from here, which is why I still think it's heavily undervalued at the moment. " It's heavily discounted still by the market, which hasn't yet come to fully grasp what's going on there." Loyal Metals (ASX:LLM) A lithium refugee, Loyal had its big coming out party in July when it procured the Highway Reward copper-gold mine in Queensland. It's now up 122% over the past month. One of the world's highest grade copper mines historically, past production saw 3.65Mt at 5.7% Cu and another 260,000t of gold ore at 4.5g/t Au. Since mining ended 20 years ago, copper prices have risen 680% and gold 1256%. "It's a high-grade copper project. It was smaller tonnes, it's a smaller footprint, but Loyal are looking for depth extensions, and there's been nothing done on this project for 20 years. No major modern geophysics, no drill program. " So they're looking for proximal discoveries, discoveries at depth or some targets that were never tested. So that's really exciting to us. "Market cap's about $25 million at the moment. We're starting from a nice low base there." Peak Minerals (ASX:PUA) Peak Minerals is one of a number of small caps enjoying the emergence of the Cameroon exploration scene, where it and DY6 Metals (ASX:DY6) have made rutile discoveries and Canyon Resources (ASX:CAY) is progressing its Minim Mirtap bauxite project. It was on a trip to Cameroon to see the latter that Peak piqued the interest of Hoff. "They're in the process of discovering what looks to be significant rutile discovery. Now mineral sands, there are varying grades and assemblages from lower value to higher value. "What they're discovering appears to me to be a really high value mineral sands discovery. "The stock's performed really well over the last couple of months. But I think ... this is when we see global scale projects, often the market will trail the results. And I think if this was in Western Australia, it'd be a much bigger company already. "The fact that it's in Cameroon and … I don't know anyone else who's been there, I think that holds investors back sometimes and provides the opportunity for those willing to look over the border." Q2 Metals Corp (TSX-V:QTWO) For the first time, Hoffy is taking his hunt for deep value global with TSX.V-listed Q2, which runs at a market cap of just C$117m. That betrays the very large potential resource its attempting to drill out at the Mia lithium project in Quebec. Lithium prices are, as is well known, in the dunny. But recent spot price increases and optimism that demand could soon overtake supply again has analysts thinking more proactively about underappreciated opportunities in the space. "We've written research on this. We think there's 207 million tonnes of spodumene there at grades of 1.3% lithium or more," Hoff said. "That puts this as potentially the sixth largest deposit in the world, sitting there with a fairly low market cap at the moment relative to that. "So I think any recovery that we see in the lithium market will translate to names like this, where there's a huge valuation gap between Patriot and Q2. Q2 is further down the line, but 200 million tonnes, again, this is something really big and their exploration target recently was even bigger than that." Torque Metals (ASX:TOR) Hoff's last pick is his only gold name, the Tolga Kumova-backed Torque. It has assets in Canada and Australia, primarily focused on the Paris gold project near Kambalda and Kalgoorlie in WA's Eastern Goldfields. "Torque's got some really interesting discovery holes coming through for a 100-mil market cap business at the moment. "Gold being that hot, it won't take long for the market's eyes turn to some of the results and you'll see the share price performance come behind that." The views, information, or opinions expressed in the interviews in this article are solely those of the interviewee 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. At Stockhead, we tell it like it is. While Loyal Metals, DY6 Metals and Prospect Resources are Stockhead advertisers, they did not sponsor this article.
News.com.au
a day ago
- News.com.au
Diggers and Dealers: Forget Trump, miners remain bullish ‘scarcity pricing' will return for lithium
Lithium miners have fronted up at 2025's gold-dominated Diggers and Dealers Liontown's Tony Ottaviano and others say the limelight on EV-hating Donald Trump has obscured a strong demand growth outlook outside the US for the battery metal PLS' Dale Henderson says it's too early to say whether the market has bottomed North American EV demand growth has ground to a halt under the policies of America's Republican strongman Donald Trump. But lithium miners say market watchers obsessed with the orange man's EV animus are missing a trick, with demand continuing to grow sharply as low prices stall supply growth. Rising Chinese-backed production at home and in Africa helped turn a lithium bull run into a second lithium winter, with spodumene prices crumbling from US$8000/t at the start of 2023 to US$600/t at their ebb in June. They have since rebounded to US$775/t, giving a glimmer of hope that the dark days could soon be behind the battery metals sector. Tony Ottaviano, the head of WA's newest lithium miner, the Gina Rinehart backed Liontown Resources (ASX:LTR), is confident 'scarcity pricing' will reemerge after low prices caused miners to pause or curtail operations and delay mine builds. "Currently, we estimate the oversupply to be in the tune of 120-130,000 tonnes," he said at the Diggers and Dealers Mining Forum in Kalgoorlie. "So based on that maths, a year and that oversupply will be consumed. "Then what is being built today to take on that new growth? If there are no new projects that are actually in construction now, it'll be three to five years before something gets built. "I can see the industry and believe me, I've been in this a long time, that we will see history repeating itself. We will get this, you know what they call it? Scarcity pricing come back in." Price signal Much of the additional supply has come from lower grade lepidolite operations opened in China by vertically integrated battery and EV giants like BYD and CATL. Speaking just months after opening the Kathleen Valley gold mine near Leinster in WA, Ottaviano says as demand outside China grows and the market gets larger, their influence on pricing should wane. Miners are keen to see the development of a more mature market with more transparent price signals. " You cannot have this sort of boom-bust and these amplitudes. You need … that steady price signal to keep that incentive going so that we can get rational new supply coming on." Dale Henderson, managing director of Pilbara Minerals (ASX:PLS), the ASX's lithium bellwether with its large Pilgangoora mine, says lithium needs a spot market place and "the right" futures exchange to enable more transparent price discovery. Volatility in spodumene and lithium carbonate pricing, including a recent surge that floated the boats of the ASX lithium sector, has been closely linked to speculative trading on China's Guangzhou Exchange. "It's essentially the only futures market, at this time," Henderson said. " To determine if that's the futures market to back, you've got to look closely at it and I couldn't offer an opinion on that. "I know some have expressed concerns around it because of its own volatility and who's actually trading on that? But regardless whether it's Guangzhou or another exchange, we need one or more very healthy exchange to help guide a healthy market." Demand on the up Where lithium exponents are united is their belief that the market is continuing to grow ... and fast. Ottaviano pointed to strong growth rates in China and Europe, noting the media's focus on Trump was obscuring green shoots elsewhere. Patriot Battery Metals (ASX:PMT) MD Ken Brinsden, the former PLS boss whose new company owns North America's largest hard rock lithium deposit at Shaakichiuwaanan in Canada's James Bay region, said the US market was currently irrelevant for the EV story. Henderson pointed out that mass energy storage, a market his former boss Brinsden believes will come to outstrip EVs, is growing at a rapid and previously unforeseen rate. The current PLS boss thinks we could be headed in that direction. "What we saw for last calendar year is the mass energy storage spoke to approximately 15% of the total demand," he said. "But what was interesting about last year is that subset had grown by approximately 50% from the prior year. "Now as we step into this calendar year, that stronger growth rate, stronger than EVs, is continuing at least so far this year. "Now, if that carries forward, it will end up eclipsing, being a larger subset of the total lithium demand." Price rebound? What every lithium bull, and there are few left, is being asked in Kalgoorlie is: when will prices turn around? Miners are loathe to put a date on it, though Henderson thinks the time spent deep in the cost curve and recent curtailments suggests the worst could be in the rear view mirror. Canaccord Genuity analyst Tim Hoff said the market would tighten, even with the US EV market flat. "We wrote a report a few weeks ago where we we went through our supply-demand and where we landed," he told Stockhead. "The last time we ran this report was in February. We were cautious on global demand, given how the US was performing and that has performed to our expectations – in terms of the USA, growth is basically flat. "However, the rest of the world and China are growing EV market share rapidly. We see adoption of these vehicles. Here in Australia, you can see it out on the roads every single day. "And so the EV demand story rolls on, the energy storage demand story rolls on – where America is actually leading the charge there. Australia will soon be putting in a lot of storage as well. And so that's strong. "So we're looking for a demand-led recovery. Prices are low enough to have stopped the supply additions. "We expect things to improve."
