Marshall Farris, President and Director of Philippine Metals Inc. (TSXV: PHI, Frankfurt: PM7*),
Introduction
We recently had the opportunity to speak once again with Marshall Farris, President and Director of Philippine Metals Inc. (TSXV: PHI, Frankfurt: PM7*), a discovery, exploration and development company focused on highly-prospective copper and copper-gold deposits in the Philippines. Taurus, Malitao and Dilong are the Company’s initial projects.
Farris has more than 17 years of experience assisting public and private companies with capital development, corporate operations, regulatory compliance activities and investor relations. He was generous enough to provide us with an update on Philippine Metals’ current projects and expectations.
The Taurus Project
The Taurus Project is a sulphide project located within the areas of Alang-Alang, Santa Fe, Palo and Tacloban City all within the Province of Leyte, Philippines.
The Company has been in the process of carrying out geophysical work on the project and recently began drilling. They have a completed IP survey that included surveying one of the six old mine sites at the Taurus project that “provided some spectacular chargeability and metal factor anomalies” that the Company recently announced at the beginning of the drilling.
Farris shares, “…we are now in the midst of an approximately 3,000-meter drill program over a total of four targets that have been identified. We’re pretty excited to finally have drilling underway on our first project.”
The good news is that Farris and the Company do not anticipate “many, if any, challenges” on the Taurus project.
Farris states, “If we’re fortunate enough to discover an economic ore body, we would work with the local community and government to try to fast track the ore body into production, hopefully within 30 months, and try to get ourselves into a cash-flowing position for our company and shareholders.”
Phenomenal Infrastructure
The Taurus project is “phenomenally located” next to a city known as Tacloban, a city that went from a small mining town to a city of 420,000 people, with a major port facility, and a major airport with six flights a day to Manila. The company has now consolidated a 17.6 km long mining district, covering six historic mines. Farris states, “The community where our projects are is there because of the mining business and because of one of the mines on our property.” He continues, “It has a major national highway running right up the side of our property boundary and 15 km away is a 120-megawatt geothermal power plant, providing us with clean renewable power—the cheapest power in all of the Philippines is on our doorstep.”
In addition to the fact that the mine is located conveniently in a town that’s evolved into a major port with a renewable energy power plant easily accessible, the Company is fortunate to have Glencore-owned PASAR smelter on the other side of the power plant. Farris states, “We’re hunting for copper. We have a copper smelter, one of the largest in Southeast Asia, right there. We’ve been in discussion with Glencore, and they’re watching this drilling very closely with a view to working on some kind of a partnership with us should we find economic ore.”
Other Projects
Though Philippine Metals’ current focus is the Taurus project, the Company is diversifying and has two other projects in their portfolio.
Dilong
Dilong is a known copper-gold porphyry discovery made in 1970 that was later abandoned in 1974.
In regards to this project, Farris shares “…due to tough economic conditions and low metal prices, the project was abandoned in 1974. We now have the right to earn 100% interest in this project and it’s a discovery that’s still yet undefined – the parameters of the deposit are undefined,” Farris continues, “It needs additional drilling and modern day mining exploration techniques applied to it to determine the economics and size of that copper-gold porphyry.”
Malitao
For Farris, this project, the Malitao project, is the “most exciting project I have seen in my career”. It’s a project that Philippine Metals is currently working to get the permitting on with hopes of their efforts coming to fruition soon.
“We have a copper-gold porphyry target, a very large copper-in-soil anomaly, over 2 ½ km in circumference. But we also, on the top corner, have an outcrop of high-grade silica mineralization. It’s interpreted by our chief geologist as a ‘Manto Replacement Deposit’,” he continues, “We have layered bornite and chalcocite exposed on the surface over about 277 meters of outcrop and the samples are outrageously high. We sent an independent geologist in who took 28 bags of samples and they averaged 34% copper, 3% zinc, 17.5 ounces per ton of silver and 1.2 grams of gold per ton, so it looks like an extremely robust system.”
Farris and the Philippine team are making efforts to work with the community and government to get the permit for this property so they can move forward to apply modern-day mining exploration techniques to the project with hopes of discovering a “world-class ore body”.
Additional Prospects
Currently, the Company is in discussions with a few different groups to discuss other potential projects and is in the process of analyzing approximately seven additional projects with the hope of announcing projects 4, 5, and 6 soon.
Why Invest in Philippine Metals?
When asked why investors should invest in Philippine Metals, Farris made a strong case for taking a look at the team involved with Philippine Metals based on his belief in looking at the people involved with any company before investing.
He states, “I would argue that investors should take a close look at the quality of the people involved in a company. I’ve been investing in the junior resources sector for over 20 years and I like to invest in companies with people with proven track records of finding deposits, developing deposits and operating mines and running mining companies. And so,” he continues, “when we went out to build this Company around these world-class projects, we focused on surrounding ourselves with a technical team and world-class mining executives. And that’s what we’ve done. So, I would say that when you’re investing in these junior mining companies, you should really be investing in the people because it’s the people with proven track records that are going to do it again. Based on this I would take a serious look at the people that we’ve put on our team.”
The Team
Indeed, Philippine Metals has a team of individuals with proven track records and a lot of experience in the mining industry, including Joey Garcia and Lou Clinton, in addition to Mr. Farris.
Chief Geologist Joey Garcia ran Lepanto, the second largest mining company in the Philippines, for 18 years as chief geologist with over 300 geologists and field crew members. Garcia has discovered ore bodies; developed ore bodies into operating mines, and was running an underground copper mine the last 5 years preceding his departure from Lepanto. After leaving Lepanto, Garcia became Newmont’s country manager where he led a team of 20 geologists with a focus on finding Lepanto a large land package with high prospects of discovering ore bodies. Farris promotes Garcia to be “the top geologist in the country”.
Lou Clinton, former President and CEO of Freeport-McMoRan, has more than 25 years of managerial experience in the industry.
For more information about Farris and Philippine Metals, visit www.philippinemetals.com .
Head Office:
Sierra Place, Suite 810
706-7th Ave SW
Calgary, Alberta
Canada T2P 0Z1
Telephone: 403.236.4520
Philippine Office:
Unit 2103 Antel Corporate Centre 121 Valero Street
Salcedo Village, Makati City
Philippines, 1227
Telephone: +632.751.8037
Fax: +632.501.5650
Investor Relations:
Jamie Mathers, Ascenta Capital Partners Inc.
Email: jamie@ascentacapital.com
Telephone: 604.684.4743 ext. 236
Toll Free: 1.866.684.4209 ext. 236