Heading into the BC Long weekend Hercules Metals dropped a huge news release. In what seems to have been an amicable changing of the guard CEO Chris Paul has moved to become VP Exploration and pretty much the entire Arizona Sonoran management team, led by George Ogilvie, is moving in to take BIG.V to the next level. Ogilvie is taking over as CEO and bringing six of his top executives with him.
The market loved the big, bold move and BIG was up $0.18 (30.5%) with 7.4 million shares traded on Canadian exchanges and nearly 600,000 in the US.
Olgivie is quoted in the release stating,
Chris and his team have made an exceptional near surface copper porphyry discovery with an epithermal silver system perched above, adding a new significant copper district in the United States. Geophysical data also indicates that other geological anomalies, potentially similar to the Leviathan discovery, may be present within the Hercules land package.
And Chris Paul states,
Hercules was founded as an early-stage exploration company around a geological concept that ultimately led to a major porphyry copper discovery. The project has now grown to a scale that requires a leadership team with top-tier mining experience, deep technical and capital-markets expertise, and a proven ability to transform major discoveries into high-value companies.
One of the most valuable things a CEO can do is recognize when a project has outgrown his own skill set. Chris Paul is an exploration geologist who started Hercules to find and develop the epithermal silver deposit known historically at Cuddy Mountain. When a long hole hit a blind copper porphyry the entire logic of the company was transformed. Epithermal silver indicated by old abandoned mines is something a junior exploration company could bring through the 43-101 process to a feasibility study and, indeed, into production. A big, deep copper porphyry, much less a porphyry system, is well beyond the scope of junior explorer. Which Paul, to his great credit, realized and realized soon enough to act on.
Which brings up the interesting question of how Olgivie and his very experienced management, mining and capital markets team happened to be available to take over the development of a major copper district. The answer is that this team had just finished selling the Arizona Sonoran Copper Company (ASCU) to HudBay Minerals for an implied value of $9.35 per ASCU share. Ogilvie joined the private company which owned the Cactus project in Arizona in July 2012. The company went public in late 2021 and its shares traded a little under $2.00 through to early 2025. Then they went for a ride touch $10.80 before the HudBay transaction was announced. Here’s the ASCU chart:
A lot of people made a lot of money as Ogilvie and his team took a promising deposit through the development process. Including, one suspects, Mr. Ogilvie and his team.
My old mining buddy said the Mt. Cuddy project would take ten years and 100 million dollars to define, much less, develop. Given the work to date and the fact BIG keeps identifying additional very attractive targets, that estimate might remain true temporally but the cash required is more like 400-500 million. To raise that sort of money requires a team with a really solid track record and a deep familiarity with the capital markets.
It also requires an exit strategy. ASCU was sold on to Hudbay which is the very definition of a “major”. No doubt Hudbay will join other majors watching the development of the Cuddy Mountain copper porphyry system and when those porphyries are ready to be mined it would not be a surprise if Hudbay takes an inside track.
For Hercules shareholders, of which I am one, the possibility of a serious payoff for a few years of patience just increased. Ogilvie’s team has a lot of geological experience as well as financial knowledge. It is a safe bet they took a deep dive into the geology, resource models, IP results and all the rest of the information Paul and his team have been accumulating before taking on a project of this size and scope. To attract the attention of this level of talent suggests very strongly that Hercules has the goods.
It would not surprise me at all if, after the Canadian August long weekend, the market began to re-rate BIG “under new management”.
(Disclaimer: I hold shares in Hercules Metals which I may sell at any time. This is not investment advice. Do your own due diligence. Call the CEO)