Beowulf Mining Plc (LON:BEM) Chief Executive Officer Kurt Budge caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the acquisition of Fennoscandian Resources, the Exploitation Concession for Kallak and Beowulf’s plans for 2016
Q1: Can you tell us about the acquisition that you’ve announced today?
A1: Yes, we’ve just announced the acquisition of a Finnish company called Fennoscandian Resources, we’ve acquired an attractive portfolio of early stage graphite assets in Finland with appealing grades and flake sizes. Finland is a known and well understood mining jurisdiction and it fits with Beowulf’s strategy to make this acquisition, given that we focussing our efforts on the Nordic countries. We believe they have a low sovereign risk profile which should be attractive to investors and clearly countries like Sweden, where we’re already currently operating, and Finland have a very established mining sector with good skills base, highly innovative and we have the added benefit of clearly having lots of infrastructure. So one of the interesting aspects of this deal is beyond the exploration prospectivity of the assets we’ve acquired, we are joining an existing partnership called FennoFlake and that’s going to give Beowulf an insight into the value chain for graphite beyond what we currently have. So what we’re doing is we’re focussing beyond solely looking at the exploration success towards production and that’s what FennoFlake gives us, it’s a broad group of partners who cover the entire span of the graphite value chain so we’re very excited about that.
Q2: How does the acquisition fit in with your plans for Kallak?
A2: So Kallak is our flagship project, it remains so, I’m actually speaking to you from the north of Sweden today where I am this week and I’ll be heading up to Jokkmokk later today to meetings with stockholders. Kallak remains our focus and clearly near-term everybody is looking for a decision by the Swedish government on Beowulf Mining’s exploitation and concession for Kallak.
Q3: I was just going to say, do you have any further information regarding the timing of that decision?
A3: Well the company wrote to the government in November last year, just asking for clarification on what was exactly happening, we haven’t had a response from the government. Clearly, we respect the government’s process, permitting wherever you’re operating in the world is, in terms of timeline, a very uncertain process but we believe, and I’ve said this time and time again over the last year in press releases and when asked the question, we’ve done everything to satisfy the requirements of the Swedish regulation. We worked very hard after I joined the company to both revisit the application that had been made to make sure there were no outstanding issues and when issues did occur, it was a short list, there was one specific issue around transport which we dealt with in November last year, we’ve worked very hard to make sure we’ve done everything to meet any outstanding concerns. So we’re very confident that when the decision is made, it’ll be a positive decision and we hope that that decision will come soon.
Q4: Brilliant. Ok, how do you see 2016 for Beowulf Mining Plc?
A4: I see 2016 as being very exciting for Beowulf. With an exploitation concession under our belt for Kallak, we can then start to move forward with our plans for that project because it’s really been on hold for the last year and also with the acquisition today of Fennoscandian Resources and the graphite projects in Finland, we are suddenly going to have plenty of work today. I think markets will remain challenging for a junior mining company, it always means that you have to be coming up with ideas to attract investors to your company to raise funds for where we are at, the exploration and development stage, on the mining value curve. I believe we are coming up with those good ideas and we do have other ideas for potential opportunities that we could be pursuing. Now our focus remains on Kallak, I’m sure that in the wider market there will be continued volatility and there will be shocks and commodity prices will rise and fall I think. We’re very fortunate at the moment as an exploration and development play, we’re not subject to the same pressures as a producer would be by the current commodity prices so we’ll take that, we’re grateful for that but we will continue to work hard on our existing portfolio and like I said, we will still be looking for new opportunities to bring other assets into Beowulf Mining Plc.
