NQ Minerals PLC (NEX:NQMI) Executive Director Roger Jackson caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss what the company does, how the business is growing in the short and long term, their current market position, strategy for the next 12 months and their future mining and exploration plans
Q1: Roger, can you explain who NQ Minerals are and what they aim to achieve?
A1: NQ Minerals is a small resource company listed on the NEX Exchange London aspiring to move to the London exchange on AIM later this year. It’s a company that was founded in North Queensland, hence the name ‘NQ’ but now has acquired a flagship project in Tasmania, Australia, which will lead us into production and cash flow through 2018 into 2019.
Q2: How do you see the business growing in the short and long term?
A2: At the moment, we’re building and refurbishing some components in the plant of the project we have in Tasmania, by August we’ll be commissioning that plant, by September we’ll be producing three concentrates of metals; lead/silver concentrate, a zinc concentrate and a gold/silver/pyrite concentrate. Those are all very saleable and good products, at the moment those metals are bringing quite good prices in the market, so we will be expecting good test flows and good revenues from this project as of about September/October this year.
Q3: Can you talk us through your current market position?
A3: At the moment, we are probably undervalued, like everyone probably feels they are, but based on the shares on issue and the share price at 11p, I believe we’re well undervalued, we have about 300,000 shares on issue at 11p so about £28/£29 million. I believe our cash flow at over AU$30 million a year would certainly have us somewhat higher than where it is at the moment, that’s for sure.
Q4: So, what does your strategy as a group look like for the next 12 months?
A4: Our first goal and the strategy is to get into production, producing cash at our Hellyer project in Tasmania which is a tailings project with, as I said, lead, silver, gold and zinc. It will be producing in September, it has a 10-year mine life at this point and will be producing revenues over that period of nearly AU$1 billion so that’s strategy one.
Strategy two is to focus upon our North Queensland assets, they are superb prospective projects with the same metals, polymetallic, and we believe we can develop our Sunbeam project up there which is a significant silver project. It will require some drilling and further development through 2019 but at some point, late 2019-2020 we’ll be at a point where we can start developing a plan mining that project.
We have our eyes on our projects and investments, we’re always keeping an eye out. We are generally focussed on Australian assets in a good sound environment and we’re happy to look around but at this stage they’re our projects that we’re focussing on.
Q5: Can you talk us through about how the business is progressing with regards to future mining and exploration plans?
A5: With the tailings project, we have built a full business plan around that, we have a feasibility study done on the mining of the tailing which is really quite a simple process of dredging the tailings material out and pumping it up to the existing plant that we’re refurbishing at this point.
Beyond that, the floating of the three concentrates through a conventional flotation processing system, those three concentrates will be packaged up and sold to various countries around the world, we’re already well advanced in our negotiations in our contracts on those markets.
We’ll also be focussing upon, with this process, refining and optimising our process so that we ca get the best recoveries and the best profit we can out of this project.
