A double header from Brazil – Brian McMaster updates on Harvest Minerals and Jangada
Are Harvest Minerals and Jangada Mines a cracking win double from the same stable?
It’s about balance for Harvest Minerals. Keeping the current customers happy, and so happy are they that they send spontaneous videos of the fruit the company’s fertiliser KP Fértil® is helping to germinate. It’s also about attracting new customers and having enough product to satisfy existing and potential clientelle.
The transition from shipping container existence to proper administration facilities on site at the Arapuá Fertiliser Project is just one reason that executive chairman Brian McMaster can says with confidence that “we’ve now graduated to the big leagues.”
High level conversations are being held about the best way to progress beyond the current benchmark of 200,000 tonnes production. Product is being kept dry and there’s the “acres” of near surface ‘ingredients’ that can be dried out quickly during rainy season.
Investors will soon be reading about the windfall that is due from a court decision ruling in Harvest’s favour concerning Agrocerrado who owe the company 2,407,690.18 million Brazilian reals. A big number that translates into a not too shabby US$463,000 and McMaster hopes this will put an end to the invoicing episode that has blighted the company history.
Learning curves about doing business in Brazil have also been experienced in McMaster’s other business Jangada Mines which he reminds investors has had a history of ‘wins’. It started out as an iron ore opportunity but the bi-products are just as interesting including recently confirmed high-grade titanium dioxide and vanadium pentoxide. They are there, and as part of the critical element requirements essential to the circular economy and energy transition it’s how best to extract them efficiently and without capital intensity.
Hence the company’s investment into Fodere Titanium Limited which has the technology and the customer base for its tech. The quid pro quo is that Jangada has the rights to use the tech in South America, but the most immediate priority is how it can progress the economics of the Pitombeiras Project which ‘independently has an NPV of $150 million.’
McMaster is working out the best way to monetise that investment.
“Payback is nine months. The economics of the project, before involving the Fodere technology, are extremely compelling.”
Equally compelling is McMaster’s comment to Sarah Lowther in the podcast below, that during this month’s trip to Brazil he’s visited an asset “that has got some really interesting characteristics and we’re trying to identify a way that we could potentially assist in the development of that asset going forward.”
Watch (below) Brian talk to Proactive’s Elisha Newell about profitability, dividends and the company’s latest trading update.
Download the latest company presentations #JAN here and #HMI here
You can follow both companies on Twitter @jangadamines & @harvestminerals
The author does not hold shares in the featured companies
