AGM Statement

RNS Number : 1156U

Thor Mining PLC

28 November 2013

 

28 November 2013

THOR MINING PLC

Annual General Meeting Statement

At today's Annual General Meeting being held at 11.00am at the offices of Grant Thornton UK LLP, 30 Finsbury Square, London, EC2P 2YU, Mick Billing, Chairman of Thor Mining PLC ("Thor" or the "Company") (AIM, ASX: THR) the Australian gold, tungsten and molybdenum explorer and developer will be making the following statement:

"The year ended June 2013 was a challenging period for many small resource companies, and Thor shared a number of those challenges.  It has however also been a period of significant achievement for Thor and we look forward to the next year with some excitement.

Tungsten

At Molyhil, the recent Letter of Intent from Global Tungsten & Powders (GTP) undertaking to take a minimum of 70% and up to 75% of our scheelite concentrate was a big step forward.  GTP are one of the larger players in the world tungsten market outside China, and we are very pleased indeed to have their participation.

In addition we have been working on a series of initiatives to improve the mine life and economics of Molyhil and we are relatively close to producing what we hope is a significant upgrade to our feasibility study.  The work done by our ore reserve consultants in 2012 indicated that an improvement of 7% in factors related to unit revenue (metal prices & exchange rate mainly, along with production recovery) would lead to an increase in the ore reserve and the mine life of greater than 50%.  Unfortunately we cannot readily influence those factors so our attention has turned to those we can influence, and these revolve around the cost of production.

I am very pleased to be able to report that via some innovative work and electing to owner operate rather than contract a number of processes and activities, we have been able to reduce operating costs substantially. Some of these have capital cost implications, however these have largely been offset by identified capital savings. There are a couple more initiatives which are currently being assessed, following which we will prepare an update to the ore reserve and the feasibility study

Gold

Within the two years since the acquisition of the initial 25% interest in Spring Hill, substantial progress has been made. This year, in addition to extending the resource, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed for processing of ore at a nearby facility, and on 24 June 2013 we announced the results of a study which may lead to the commencement of gold production, at very low capital cost, within the next twelve months.

We are also on track to achieve our goal of increasing our interest in Spring Hill to 80% by the due date of 31 January 2014.

At Dundas in Western Australia, progress was limited as we concentrated all available funds on the other projects. However, looking forward, we hope to be in a position to test a number of promising targets in the near term.

Outlook

Our challenges ahead are to complete the upgrade to the Molyhil feasibility study and secure funding for that project.  We should not underestimate this task, however discussions have commenced and we certainly believe that the project is well worth the investment. We look forward to the next year eagerly"

Analyst Research

Progressive Equity Research has initiated research coverage on Thor Mining PLC and the full report can be downloaded from: www.progressive-research.com/tearsheet/research/thor-mining-plc/thor-mining-pedal-to-the-metal

Enquiries:

Mick Billing	[phone]	Thor Mining PLC	Executive Chairman
Allan Burchard	[phone]	Thor Mining PLC	CFO/Company Secretary
Colin Aaronson/ David Hignell	[phone]	Grant Thornton Corporate Finance	Nominated Adviser
Nick Emerson/ Renato Rufus	[phone]	Simple Investments	Broker
Alex Walters	[phone] [phone]	Cadogan PR	Financial PR

 

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