Great Sunday Morning Read

Posted by Equedia

Share on Facebook

Tweet on Twitter

gg

Revisiting a Breakthrough – The Original Gold Super Hero

With investors hurdling toward gold as our Government prints more money, I am reminded of astory that many gold enthusiasts may already know. It’s a story about a real life gold super hero whose deviance of conventional wisdom turned a failing corporation into one of the world’s largest gold producers.

Many of you who have been a part of Equedia Weekly for a long time will have already heard this story before. But with gold hitting yet another all time high and our many references to the Gold Super Hero in the past few weeks, its only fitting for us to revisit this incredible story one more time.

Rob McEwen wasn’t a miner. He was a young man following his father’s footsteps into the business world. Like his dad, he had a fascination for gold.

After years of growing up hearing stories around the dinner table of miners and prospectors, he finally got his shot.

One day, he stepped into a takeover battle as a white knight and emerged triumphantly as majority owner of a mine in Red Lake, Ontario. Here he stood at the head of the boardroom table filled with a room full of experienced senior geologists, all of whom doubted his ability to lead this company. Who could blame them? He was a mutual fund manager turned CEO of a gold corporation overnight.

This company was:  Goldcorp

gg

But it was hardly a dream come true. The company he had taken over was plagued with negative news and on the brink of failure. The miners were on strike and they were overwhelmed by lingering debts. The gold market was contracting and the mine’s operating costs were exceedingly high, forcing them to cease mining operations. Unless they found evidence of new gold deposits, the fifty-year old mine was about to be shut down along with the company.

191

McEwen knew that the mine had potential. “The Red Lake gold district had 2 operating gold mines and 13 former mines that had produced more than 18 million ounces combined,” he says. “The mine next door had produced about 10 million ounces. Ours had produced only 3 million.” So he sent his geologists packing with $10 million dollars and a plan to drill in the most remote and deepest parts of the mine.

A few weeks later the geologists returned. With smiles on their faces, they broke the news to McEwen that would save Goldcorp – at least for another few years. They had found results signalling new deposits of gold as much as thirty times the amount they had been mining at the company. But that wasn’t enough.

The senior staff continued years of further exploration in attempts to find a more accurate depiction of the gold’s value and location. Despite the expertise and experience among the staff of senior geologists, their efforts proved stagnant. It had become obvious that something critical needed to change if they were to secure a future for Goldcorp. They needed to act faster.

Exhausted and uncertain about Goldcorp’s future, McEwen decided to take a break for some personal development. He attended a MIT conference in 1999, where corporate presidents from around the world had come to learn about advances in information technology. Perched up in his chair, he listened as the lecturer talked about how Linus Torvalds built a masterpiece computer operating system by revealing his code to anonymous programmers all around the world on the internet.

Without the help of thousands of anonymous participants, the Linux system would have cost millions of dollars to produce and would have taken years. But it didn’t.

Then it hit him. If his senior geologists couldn’t find the gold in Red Lake, maybe someone else could.

McEwen wasn’t a miner. He didn’t think like one either. But that was his strength. So he rushed back to his corporate head office in Toronto to share his idea of “open sourced” mining.

McEwen wanted to take all of the data the company has spent creating in the last fifty years and he wanted to share it openly with the world by posting it on the internet: “Then we’ll ask the world to tell us where we’re going to find the next six million ounces of gold.”

At first, Goldcorp’s geologists were appalled at the idea of exposing their fifty years of secret data to the world. And they had good reasons to be. The mining industry is an intensely guarded business and geological data is to miners what treasure is to pirates. Giving this sort of data away could not only subject you to takeover risks, but can also imply that your company no longer has the ability to move forward on its own.

Despite the inherent risks, McEwen decided to push forward and in March 2000, he launched the “Goldcorp Challenge.” They posted every bit of information they could on their 55,000-acre property through their website and setup a contest offering $575,000 worth of prize money to the participants that could show Goldcorp the best methods and estimates on their property.

McEwen knew this strategy entailed big risks. But the risks of continuing to do things the old way were even greater.

“Mining is one of humanity’s oldest industrial pursuits,” McEwen says. “This is old economy. But a mineral discovery is like a technological discovery. There’s the same rapid creation of wealth as rising expectations improve profitability. If we could find gold faster, we could really improve the value of the company.”

And improve the value they did. Within weeks, submissions from over one thousand virtual prospectors in over fifty countries crunched the data. But geologists weren’t the only participants.

Mathematicians, graduate students, consultants, and military officers all submitted entries. They had, “applied math, advanced physics, intelligent systems, computer graphics, and organic solutions to inorganic problems.”

Not only had the contestants identified new targets on the Red Lake property, they introduced Goldcorp to state-of-the-art technologies and exploration methodologies, including new drilling techniques and data-collection procedures, and more advance approaches to geological modeling.

McEwen had harnessed a technological trend that most in the industry would have shunned. As a result, he turned his destined-for-failure $100 million company into a company today worth over $27 billion – even in our currently depressed market.

In a recent newsletter, we announced the discovery of a gold junior play: Trueclaim Exploration Inc. (TSX-V: TRM). If you have not already read the report, you can find it by clicking HERE.

gg2

In that report, we talked about Trueclaim’s (TSX-V: TRM) Scadding Gold Property and their drill program (which has now begun – see news release by clicking HERE) to define and increase the known non-NI 43-101-compliant resource on the Property as well as seek other mineralization discoveries within the targeted areas.

To date, the Phase I plan consists of a minimum of fourteen (14) defined targets distributed around three mined regions identified as the North, South and East-West zones. Each of these zones has had prior limited drilling that produced high gold assay values. At the same time, however, the Company has noted that from the analysis of past drilling data, and detailed modelling, potential new targets and zones appear to exist and may extend off the immediate mine area.

With gold prices hovering over $1150/ounce, we are eagerly anticipating their first drill results. With a low market cap, strong news combined with positive results from this drill program could surely have an impact on their share value.

McEwen’s courage to challenge the mining industry’s safe-keeping of geological data reveals to us that change can lead to astonishing results.

With today’s change in technology and commodities price rally, this may be the opportunity of a lifetime for many investors and mining and resource juniors. New technologies and high prices are allowing historically great projects to resurrect themselves from the grave.

And it will be the juniors that dig them out and breathe life back into the markets. Don’t miss this run.

 

Article provided by:

119

http://www.equedia.com/