Mako Mining – A Strategy Towards Scale With Organic Production And Exploration Growth Paired With Future Acquisitions
Akiba Leisman, President and CEO of Mako Mining (TSX.V:MKO – OTCQX:MAKOF), joins us for an overall Company strategy update for both operations and exploration update at and around the San Albino Gold Mine in Nicaragua. We start off discussing the rationale behind some of the recent corporate initiatives like the reverse stock split, the financing transactions with Sailfish Royalty, and the balance sheet extension and increase in net working capital. The evolving strategy is to grow the company in scale and make it more relevant to the public market to attract more passive funds capital.
We get an update on the San Albino mine operations, and Akiba highlights how the mill is now operating between 120% – 125% on nameplate capacity north of 600 tpd, and often getting up into 610-620 tpd in throughput. He also outlines that the past 2 quarters had a larger west pit pre-strip ratio that will be essentially eliminated moving forward, and additionally the blend will go back to more of a 50/50 ratio between lower-grade stockpiles and higher-grade diluted vein material. Another key near-mine development was the 65,000 meters of drilling at the Los Conchitas Project, all feeding into an updated resource estimate targeting Q3 of 2023, which will be followed by an updated mine plan and economics.
This leads to a more expanding conversation on how the exploration team has been very active with RC drilling for mining planning and proving up where the high-grade gold veins are, at a greatly reduced cost in improved speed, but that don’t provide reliable grades that can be reported to the market. As a result, it may have appeared to the market that the Company was not doing as much exploration, when in fact they were drilling at an aggressive pace. However, the company did just make an impressive new gold discovery of 41.99 g/t Au over 1.4 meters at the La Segoviana Concession, located approximately 17 km to the north of the company’s 100% owned San Albino gold mine. The exploration teams believes there is plenty more there to explore as the orogenic gold system is quite continuous in mineral occurrences all of their property.
We wrap up with some big picture thoughts from Akiba on how the company could eventually expand the milling throughput to increase production even further, but that ultimately it is in conversations and reviewing potential value-accretive transactions for mergers and acquisitions. This will provide the future scale the company seeks to attain to attract more investment capital and a better cost of capital.
If you have any questions for Akiba about Mako Mining, then please email me at Shad@kerport.com.
- In full disclosure, Shad is a shareholder of Mako Mining.
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As Akiba mentioned in the interview when addtressing that very question: They could spend $4 million in capex and double the mill capacity whenever they feel the ore development is ready to support that. This capex spend would need to be paired with an environment of a better cost of capital and better market sentiment for the associated increases in explorarion meters drilled that would be necessary (which in 2022 and so far in 2023, the marketplace has not been valuing/rewarding companies enough to make that worthwhile).
He outlined that they increased the mill throughput from 500 tpd up to 610-620 tpd in the interim, which is over 120% of nameplate throughput.
Why is it taking so long to double the existing mill capacity if most of the infrastructure is already there as previously stated?????.