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coVeR

Africa sparks new chapter

for Sandfire

O nce first copper concentrate is produced from the Motheo project

in Botswana next year, Sandfire Resources Ltd will boast three
operating assets on three different continents. It will mark the latest step
in a remarkable journey from parochial West Australian junior miner with
a dwindling reserve base to globalised mid-tier copper miner with what
feels like almost infinite organic growth options.

he metamorphosis has taken just three fire into a global hunt for complementary Sandfire paid $167 million in cash and
Tyears. At the end of 2018, Sandfire and eventually replacement assets. scrip for Mod, delivering it both T3 and
looked the classic Australian junior min- However, with the global copper dis- the wider 12,000sq km Motheo explora-
er. Its high-grade DeGrussa copper-gold covery pipeline as dry as it has been in tion package.
mine in WA hadn’t missed a beat since decades, options were limited. The Mod DFS had shown $250 million
discovery in 2009, producing up to 60,000 It finally settled on ASX-listed junior of capex could deliver a 29,000 tpa cop-
tpa of copper at margins which were the Mod Resources, which had built a huge per-in-concentrate operation with a NPV
envy of the entire resources sector. landholding on the Kalahari copper belt in of $309 million and while hardly compa-
The problem was that the contained, the Southern African nation of Botswana rable to the high-grade cash dispenser
discrete nature of the VMS deposits at and had already produced a positive DFS DeGrussa had become, Motheo did offer
DeGrussa meant further finds in the Dool- for the recently discovered T3 copper de- the long-term growth potential Sandfire
gunna district were unlikely, forcing Sand- posit. was seeking.

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