Mawson Resources’ President and CEO Michael Hudson at the New Orleans Investment Conference
Headquartered in Vancouver but operating mainly in Europe, Mawson Resources is a gold and uranium company that is focused primarily on Finland and Sweden but with a gold-copper play in Peru.
President and CEO Michael Hudson is a geologist who has spent the last twenty years looking for metals around the world. “It’s my passion,” he comments. “It’s what we exploration geologists love to do.”
Strong Technical Group
Michael Hudson founded the company in 2004 with three associates who are still on the board. Since then, they’ve added a mining engineer “who keeps the geologists honest”. Michael explains: “Geologists are great explorers but you also have that development angle that a mining engineer brings to the board. So, we’re a strong technical group, we’ve been together for a long time, we’re very heavily committed to the company and we still have 12% of it.”
The company’s key property is Rompas in Finland, which it bought recently from French multi-national Areva, with the latter retaining a 9.5% interest in Mawson. Areva discovered the property in late 2008 but did little work there before deciding to reduce its activities in Finland. Mawson was then in negotiation with Areva for a year before the deal was done and acquired Rompas. As a result, the company has only spent around five months exploring the property but is excited by the results achieved so far.
Michael says: “We are potentially on a world-class discovery. It’s only very new, five months work, but we have some amazing gold and uranium grades over a large footprint with great regularity of discovery, something that we don’t see in this business. There’s nothing better in the marketplace that I’ve seen today. We’ve got plus 1000 grams average gold in samples and 3% uranium over a footprint of two kilometers by 600 meters. Hundreds of these sites have been discovered over the last few months.”
Mawson is historically a uranium company and was one of the first to move into Finland and Sweden, where it now has a number of legacy resources. Michael remarks: “We’ve got about 15 million pounds in legacy resources, which we’ve made into 43-101 resources and expanded over the last few years. And we notice that uranium’s starting to get a bit more interest now than it has had for the last few years.”
The Rompas discovery is a hydrothermal system that Michael reckons is a strange mineralization style, especially given the grade. He has seen similar systems in Australia and Brazil but the formation style differs at Rompas. However, the key point is that, even at this early stage, he believes the results are more than encouraging: “We’ve got 90% of the results still in the laboratory. The initial results are out there for the public, Areva’s and our initial due diligence results. We have a 43-101 technical report on the website that summarizes that work. But 90% of the news flow will come out over the next three months so it’s an exciting time.”
Crazy Numbers
Only 5% of the 6 kilometer trend comes close enough to the surface to be discovered with hand held spectrometers. “If we get a hit, we dig down and we get massive uranium and bonanza gold,” comments Michael. “Then we get these absolutely crazy numbers. I didn’t believe the numbers when I saw the project but we have validated it and the project’s stacking up after five months work. And we’re finding hundreds more of these sites. At Rompas grade is certainly king.”
Gold grains within uraninite and partly weather carbonate from Rompas (source: Areva)
“If the soil's thicker than thirty centimeters, we physically won’t see the mineralization because the soil will mask it. We estimate that 95% of the area is thicker soil. We know that we’ve found two zones within the six kilometer trend; the southern zone measures 1.5 kilometers and the northern zone one kilometer with an average 200 meters width. Both these zones continue under cover and between these two zones we have spot gold hits. But we’ve literally only had a few days’ exploration in between those two zones. It’s certainly got the hallmarks of a world-class system in terms of grades, scale and frequency of discovery.”
Exploration is at such an early stage that there are no drill holes so far. Mawson is still trying to understand what it’s got and has mapped and flown 3000 kilometers of airborne geophysics in the last two months. However, more data will start to flow during the next three months and the project should move forward quickly.
Well Funded
Mawson currently has approximately 50 million shares issued, which trade at around $1. It has also just completed a private placement with the Sentient Group, a very strong resource fund. As well as demonstrating the credibility of what the company is doing, it also means it has $14 million in the bank and is well funded to execute its exploration program.
Michael is keen to ensure expectations don’t get too advanced, due to the project’s early stage. He says: “It’s so new that we are only in the application stage. In Finland, we’ve got 100% security of title but, during the application stage, we’re only entitled to do low level exploration. That means hand-held drill rigs and sampling at surface until we get that final claim granted, which takes some time. I hope this will be next year some time.”
He is, however, convinced that there are several good reasons for investors to be interested. Not least is the quality of the team at Mawson. Michael comments: “Everyone can have a good project but, if you don’t have the right people to run it, you really are in a hole. We’ve got a very solid group of people who’ve been around in the public markets for many years with a very strong technical base. We’re very committed to what we’re doing.”
In addition to the potentially world-class Rompas discovery, the company also has a good property in Peru and a 43-101 uranium resource base in Finland and Sweden. “There are not many world-class systems out there,” remarks Michael. “They’re hard to find, harder these days than ever before and this is such early days. We have the money to do the job and we’re out there doing it with a lot of news flow coming to the market. There are short-term, medium-term and long-term reasons why an investor should seriously run the ruler over Mawson.”
For more information:
http://www.mawsonresources.com/
Mawson Resources Ltd - Canada
Mariana Bermudez - Corporate Secretary
Tel: +1 (604) 685 9316
Fax: +1 (604) 683 1585
Email: info@mawsonresources.com
Investor Relation Consultants - Mining Interactive:
Nick Nicolaas +1 (604) 657 4058
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
nick@mininginteractive.com
www.mininginteractive.com
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