“I’m a bit of fresh air coming into the Anglesey story,” says Jo Battershill, the new chief executive of Anglesey Mining PLC (LSE:AYM).
His appointment is designed to breathe new life into an old, familiar company that’s been making steady progress for years, but which hasn’t quite yet got a project up to the starting blocks.
Battershill’s confident, though, that he’s the man to bring Anglesey’s Parys Mountain copper-zinc the final few yards, and to get the ground broken and mining started.
“We’re hoping to commence drilling within three-to-four weeks,” he says.
“It’s work I would class as feasibility work.”
Anglesey already boasts a robust preliminary economic assessment, based around 5.2mln tonnes of ore in the indicated category and 11.7mln tonnes inferred. Battershill reckons there’s significant scope to expand the resource, though, and he also points out that earlier economic assessments used much lower copper, zinc and lead price assumptions.
It was a different world back then in other ways too.
Pre-Covid, no-one was talking about supply chain issues in the way they are now, and the rise of ESG was only just beginning.
That’s why, in many ways, Battershill is re-working every aspect of Parys.
The project benefits from full planning permission, but that permission is decades old, and so Battershill has volunteered that Anglesey will update the environmental and social parameters off its own bat, and that it is more than willing to draw on the abundant local wind power as its major energy source.
These gestures of goodwill are likely to be well received in official circles, where there’s also much interest in the local employment opportunities that an operating mine at Parys will present.
So far, so good.
Mining studies are well advanced, with a contractor in the shape of QME already well positioned if a decision to mine is made, the local authorities seem to be on board, and Battershill’s clearly got the will to make this work.
But what, really, is his vision?
First, it’s worth pointing out that he comes with a wealth of mining and financial experience behind him. He didn’t just walk into this job by accident. On the contrary, he’s worked in the underground nickel mines at Western Mining Corporation, one of Australia’s most famous mining names, and subsequently got to know the corporate world through long stints at UBS and Canaccord.
Anglesey isn’t a new name to him either. Rather, he’s had his eye on it for a long, long time.
“I’ve followed Parys for almost fifteen years,” he says.
“Some former colleagues of mine from Australia tried to buy it just before the global financial crisis. But that got derailed.”
More water then flowed under the bridge, but as Anglesey’s long-standing former chief executive Bill Hooley decided to move across to the non-exec suite, Battershill saw an opportunity.
And it’s not just that Anglesey already has most of the ingredients in place for the making of a successful project.
It’s also a question of valuation.
“I look at similar opportunities in Australia and Canada,” says Battershill, “and by comparison I can see Anglesey is tremendously undervalued.”
He cites as a particular example Eagle Mountain Mining, which is Australian-listed, with a North American asset and which raised A$16mln recently on the back of an asset currently smaller and lower grade than Parys.
Anglesey hasn’t punched at that level for some time now, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t again. The market has got used to a sedentary rate of progress and is about to be rudely awakened.
After all, it seems likely that Parys will end up producing something of the order of 750,000 to a million tonnes of ore per annum, to deliver between 15,000 and 20,000 tonnes of copper equivalent, albeit in concentrate form.
While that won’t lead to self-sufficiency for the British Isles, not least because of the absence of smelting capacity here, it’s not chicken feed either.
“It’s about being part of the supply chain,” says Battershill, and that’s something that governments of every hue are becoming increasingly concerned with.
What does it all mean for the share price?
Well, there’s a fair way to go yet before any copper comes out of the ground. But it’s clear Battershill hasn’t taken this job on to serve time. He clearly intends to get a mine built at Parys. Somewhere along the line while he does it, there’ll clearly be a substantial re-rating.