VRIC: After Action Report
About four times as many people registered to attend VRIC 2023 as registered last year. COVID is obviously a big part of that story, but something else seems to have been driving attendance. The junior explorers are dragging along the bottom. News has become a liquidity event. Talking to assorted CEOs, analysts and investors, there was a real sense that, having been ignored for two years, juniors have become attractive again.
Cycle bottoms make it hard to raise money and VRIC is relatively expensive. Which meant that the number of exhibitors was down this year. Notably absent were the Zimtu group of companies which have been the “anchor tenant” for VRIC for years.
This year that “anchor tenant” role was taken up by Yukon. Executive Director Anne Lewis has been working very hard for a decade to get multiple mining, development and exploration companies into alignment with the Government of the Yukon. Those companies, Victoria Gold, Western Copper and Gold, White Gold and many more have reached critical mass attracting investment from “the majors”, producing or heading towards production, drilling well developed targets.
Nearly a full aisle on both sides was taken up with Yukon companies. A presentation room offered continuous, well set up presentations and panels on both the companies and the Yukon mining environment from infrastructure to First Nations relations. It was great to see David D’Onofrio standing in for prospecting legend Shawn Ryan to talk about at least a dozen very prospective targets being pushed along towards development. It is a huge endowment and nearly impossible to cover in a 20 minute talk. David managed and, more importantly, conveyed the excitement this sort of set of properties can generate.
Now, the real value in a conference like VRIC is the little tidbits of information: I was congratulating David on his presentation and his investment fund, Power One Group’s participation in White Gold, “Well, we’re patient money. We’ve been doing Encore Uranium for eleven years.”
I had just been chatting with Bill and Janet Sheriff over at the Encore booth which was not tied into the Yukon. I had no idea that David and his group had been invested. Bill had been explaining to me how much he was enjoying working on uranium projects in his home state of Texas. Janet was more than willing to do an interview, “Any day but February 6. That’s when I’m becoming a US citizen.” The good news for Canada is that Janet is retaining her Canadian citizenship.
I went across the street to a fairly new restaurant called the Rilley where Cornish Metals was hosting a small lunch. I have written about Cornish before and my sweetie is the Empress of Tin with Cornish shares in her TFSA. I was very interested in how the company was progressing. Over a great lunch CEO Richard Williams walked us through the challenges and the opportunity at South Crofty in Cornwall. What was striking was the sheer scale of old workings. Literally hundreds of miles of old tunnels, multiple shafts and a lot of water. Dewatering the old works is expected to take 18 months. But before that can get underway, a water treatment plant needs to be built and it is under construction. Meanwhile, Cornish is drilling and reporting exploration holes in previously mined but under explored areas.
While the price of tin fluctuates wildly, the demand for tin, especially domestically produced tin, is on a steady rise. All those integrated circuits needed for EVs, smart phones, computers need to be soldered to the circuit boards. As Williams pointed out sounding the “l” in solder. Money in the bank, an expanding resource and a well thought out plan should make Cornish a star performer over the next few years.
[I will write up Part II tomorrow.}