Jubilee Metals Group plc (LON:JLP) Chief Executive Officer Leon Coetzer caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the three transactions and the value they bring to the company and what’s next on the horizon.
Jubilee Metals Group is an industry leading metal recovery business focussing on the retreatment and metals recovery from mine tailings, waste, slag, slurry, and other secondary materials generated from mining operations. Today, the company announced significant further progress at its Copper and Cobalt tailings project in Zambia with the successful execution of three strategic transactions. With me to discuss the update is CEO Leon Coetzer.
Q1: Leon, could you explain and put into context these three transactions that you’ve announced this morning and what it means in value to the company?
A1: It’s a big day for us and our shareholders. These three transactions really tests and demonstrates our absolute commitment to our copper and cobalt strategy in Zambia where we are absolutely focussed in executing these transactions with all the energy we’ve got.
What these transactions deliver to the company is the fact that we are able to increase significantly our position and ownership of our three joint venture projects in Zambia that incorporates this 300 million tonnes of surface tailings that we look to process and recover both copper and cobalt.
These transactions are strategically timed that it comes at a time where we are about to commence the commissioning of our first large copper concentrator at Project Roan which will be feeding nearly 10,500 tonnes of copper units to our refinery.
In our Northern project, we’ve been tremendously encouraged by the cobalt recovery results coming out of our processed development centre. We’re very eager to increase our exposure and ownership at that project to ensure that the development and the results being reflected out of our cobalt development process is secured for the company and its shareholders.
It therefore also means that with this new controlling position we’ve now secured across our projects, we can influence and dictate in what order we bring these projects to fruition and continue to accelerate the capital investment to deliver the full 25,000 tonnes of copper units per annum.
In value, if you just look at the Southern refining side, it will give you a sense of what these transactions have achieved where we target 10,500 of copper units. We’ve told the market before that our cost to produce a unit of copper through our concentrators and our refinery’s are coming in roughly at $4,500 copper unit and if you look at the current trading values of copper, that means we’re securing nearly $5,000 exclusively for the business and its shareholders per unit of copper and not sharing that with any JV partner.
That’s just on the Southern side and excludes much larger Northern Refining strategy where we’ve also now increased our position in those projects.
Q2: As always, there’s an awful lot going on for Jubilee Metals Group, what else is on the horizon?
A2: At the moment, it’s execution and build. We are bringing Project Roan, our first large copper concentrate project into, as of November this year, targeting to reach its full production cycle in Q1 of next year as we fill up our Sabre refinery.
Simultaneously, on the back of our Mopani transaction, we are executing our two further projects in Zambia which will deliver two new copper concentrators and a cobalt concentrator feeding into our Northern refinery targeting 15,000 copper units over the next 14 months.
Of course, we are happy that in South Africa, our capital investment that’s gone into our PGM plant, where we’ve dramatically increased that capacity, as well as completing the execution of two more chrome circuits earlier this year, all of that has come to fruition.
We can now focus on the execution of our Zambian strategy.
