Spartan takeover talk: major shareholder said to eye $1-plus for runaway gold explorer

Spartan MD Simon Lawson was a late starter at the Melbourne Mining Club’s “Cutting Edge” series on Tuesday night at the Town Hall.

It was through no fault of his own. His Qantas flight took a detour to Kalgoorlie for reasons only Qantas knows. But in true Spartan-style, Lawson marched on through Melbourne’s usual evening traffic snarl to eventually get to tell the Spartan story.

After apologising for looking like a homeless guy – he likes to present with a Windsor tie - Lawson was then stopped in his tracks while a tech issue with his audio-visuals were sorted out.

But again he marched on to tell the story about how a company that was worth $70 million in February last year at 10c a share is now worth close to $800m (ASX:SPR, 72c a share), making it a candidate for ASX300 index inclusion which prompts buying from index-hugging funds.

Spartan’s rapid growth in market value is down to the high-grade Never Never discovery at its Dalgaranga gold project near Mt Magnet in Western Australia. The near 1 million ounce and rising discovery sits all of 600m from a 2.5mtpa treatment plant.

The treatment plant was placed on care & maintenance in November 2022 because life was too hard processing less than 1g/t dirt from the Gilbey’s open-cut, with the earlier 2022 Never Never discovery obviously going to take time to become Dalgaranga’s high-grade backbone.

Never Never has a 1.6Moz-1.9Moz exploration target on it, and the recent discovery of the adjacent Peppers high-grade deposit, and others extending below the Gilbey’s pit, mean when Dalgaranga does come back, it will be a high-grade producer.

Lawson is a bit coy on just when the return will happen. But it is near-term in the scheme of things, with Lawson adamant that the new underground mining and processing operation will be bullet proof before the button is pushed.

A mineral resource update and prefeasibility study on a Dalgaranga restart are planned in the second half of the year (the MRE will include a maiden estimate for Pepper), while momentum in the march to a resumption in production is being maintained with the company’s $110m cash kitty.

That includes the recent $80m equity raise at 58c. There was $300m in demand, which says something about expectations around a bullet-proof Dalgaranga and investor appetite for high-grade gold stories when the gold price is in record territory.

The question on many lips is will Spartan remain independent given deposits like Never and Never, and likely Pepper, don’t come along all that often. It has been in M & A sights before (Westgold), and regional players include the acquisitive Silver Lake and Ramelius.

They all had a chance to move earlier at lower levels. But then again, if Dalgaranga continues to shape up as a long-lived gold producer of high-grade gold, it is anybody’s guess.

What is known is that any M & A action would have to start at $1-plus. We know that because of a phone chat Lawson had earlier in the week with John Hodder from private equity resources fund Tembo Capital, a long-term backer of Spartan.

Hodder stepped down from the Spartan board recently, prompting talk that maybe Tembo’s time on the Spartan register with a holding of about 15% was also up, as PE firms are want to do when they’ve made a killing.

But Lawson relayed that Hodder told him that he is not interested in selling for less than $1 a share.

As it is, Spartan shares have been holding up nicely this week thanks to the news of the extensional high-grade hits at depth at Pepper (including 14.73m at 11.42g/t from 553.73m, including 4.37m at 36.8g/t.)

Adding to the story is nice if you can, particularly if the backdrop is the gold price taking a breather from its recent record levels.

Wildcat:Patriot:Raiden:

The lithium space on the ASX continues to sort itself out after last year’s rout in prices for the battery material.

A clear theme to emerge is that most ASX juniors will probably reinvent themselves as gold, silver, copper or whatever stocks in the months ahead.

Funding has evaporated as mining investors swim across the pool to the hot precious and base metals space.

When the money runs out it, it runs out, so grassroots lithium aspirations are best parked up for the time being.

It is a different story for the explorers well on their way to becoming developers, particularly where their projects have Tier 1 credentials.

The best examples out there are Wildcat (WC8) and Patriot (PMT). Wildcat pulled in $100m last November to keep up a cracking pace at its Tabba Tabba discovery in the Pilbara and Patriot has just pulled in $C75m to do the same at its Corvette project in Canada.

The share prices of both are obviously well short of their highs of last year.

But given their Tier 1 credentials in a lithium market that has found a bottom and which is in now in a tentative recovery mode, their potential share price upside has become increasingly hard to ignore.

To that end, it was interesting to see Canaccord’s $1 price target on Wildcat following an exploration update on results from the recent Luke pegmatite discovery, and Macquarie’s $1.90 a share target price on Patriot after its equity raise.

WC8 was trading on Thursday at 49c, and Patriot was 91c. The common theme between the pair is the scale of their projects. A maiden resource for Tabba Tabba is expected in the second half (Canaccord has 80Mt as a “realistic near-term target” beyond the initial estimate) while Patriot is already there with its 100Mt-plus and growing Corvette.

The earlier suggestion that the junior lithium explorers should reinvent themselves is not a blanket suggestion. There are some that have highly anticipated exploration programs coming up that will be worth watching.

One of those is Raiden’s (ASX:RDN) Andover North project where there has been a bit of a wait for approvals to kick-off a drilling program to test the “numerous stacked and mineralised pegmatites” that have been identified.

As the name suggests, the ground is north of Andover, the lithium discovery by the 70:30 partnership between Azure and Mark Creasy. Azure has just been bought by SQM and Gina Rinehart for $1.7 billion, without a public mineral resource estimate being announced.

But is a very, very big find. The hope for Raiden is that the Andover success spreads into its ground. The stock has been trending up in recent weeks in anticipation of the first holes not being far off now. It was last quoted at 4.9c for a market cap of $132m.

Sunstone:

Trenching results are not drilling results. But when the trenches sit over a prospect already ranked as a discovery with an exploration target of 900,000-1.7 million ounces of gold equivalent, it’s time to take notice.

That’s what’s happening at Sunstone (ASX:STM) at its Limon epithermal gold-silver discovery at the broader Bramaderos project in southern Ecuador.

Trenching results included 14.95m at 4.8 g/t gold, including 6.2m at 10.7g/t gold. There was also some visible gold for good measure.

Now for the follow up work with the drill bit. Drilling is due to start in June in two areas 1km apart – a good an indication as any that Sunstone reckons it is on to a large-scale system at Limon.

It is early days but Limon is shaping up as potential “starter” pit while work continues to tease out the large-scale porphyry gold/copper story at depth at Bramaderos.

Sunstone last traded at 1.2c for a market of cap of $44 million.

Start thinking about a starter pit with say 100,000-150,000pa gold equivalent potential, and the market cap is interesting when compared with what that sort of potential would be valued at if Limon was in WA.

Sunstone also owns the El Palmar gold-copper porphyry (from surface) discovery in northern Ecuador where a starter pit scenario is also unfolding ahead of the full potential of the porphyry system there being pinned down.