Goldplat plc (LON:GDP) Chief Executive Officer Gerard Kisbey-Green caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the commissioning of the first stage of the new processing plant at Kilimapesa and what investors should be looking out for in the coming months
Q1: Now, some positive news out today on the commissioning of the first stage of the new processing plant at Kilimapesa, can you talk us through the timescales involved in the 3 stages?
A1: As I said in the announcement, Goldplat began the commissioning of what we called stage 1 on the 23rd December, that is now complete and in fact we’re going to have the official opening of the plant by the Minerals Commissioner on the 16th February.
We’ve begun what we call stage 2 and that entails the installation of the front end of the plant which is the crusher circuit as well as 3 CIL tanks and as per the announcement we do expect that to be concluded/completed within or by the end of the month of April, obviously, dependant on how the new installation goes but we’re confident of that timeframe. That should get us up to 120 tonnes per day, currently we’re producing at a rate of 60 tonnes a day and that’s constrained really by the residence time within our current CIL plant circuits and obviously with stage 2, having installed an additional 3 CIL tanks as well as the crusher circuit, we’ll be able to increase the residence time and the throughput about 120 tonnes per day.
The commencement of stage 3, really it depends on how thing go. Until the installation of an additional mill, in other words we’ll be doubling our milling capacity and it will also obviously then need some more CIL tanks, we’re really going to see how the plant is running, how the tailings are working out, how production from the mine is matching the throughput of the plant and then we’ll take a view at that point in time as to when we will tick off the installation of stage 3. So, really, it’s dependant on how well stage 2 goes financially and practically on the ground.
Q2: Obviously, the positive news has an effect on share price, what should investors be looking out for in terms of news flow over the coming 12 months for Goldplat?
A2: 12 months is a long time, if we look at bit closer than that, we have the interims coming out in a couple of weeks’ time, normally at this time, towards the last week in February and I’m targeting Monday 20th February for issuing and making public the interim results to the end of December 2016. We have indicated to the market that we are making good progress with our investigations in South America and we should be able to announce, probably in the next month or so, some results in terms of how things are looking and whether or not we’ve signed any contracts. Then really it’s open ground as to what happens thereafter, we’ve got our annual results at the end of August, we finish the year end of June.
We’ve also spoken to the market about constantly taking a look at the capital market out there and whether we were able to access the capital markets, being public or private, and being debt or equity, in due course and we continue to look at that, if anything would transpire then obviously, there’ll be news flow after that. We also hope to make an announcement with respect to the tailing infrastructure facility in South Africa, we’ve been trying to get access to a nearby open pit for deposition of tailing and hopefully that’ll also be news flow in the short-term, we can then start processing, or at least start planning, the processing of the tailing facility.
That’s probably all we have got on the horizon which should be a regular news flow and a good news flow if everything goes well. If, like you said, there’s a correlation between the share price and news flow then hopefully we can continue with our stable and steady upwards trend in our share price.
