While countless junior miners will fall prey to the unavoidable consolidation trend within the metals mining sector, Taseko Mines
For a mid-sized copper producer with a puny little market capitalization, Taseko Mines just made a giant leap towards finding its own path to production at the prolific Prosperity gold and copper project. Taseko recently signed a letter of intent with Japanese trading house Sojitz to sell a 25% stake in the Gibraltar mine or consideration of about $170 million.
This deal values the Gibraltar mine alone at $680 million, which is greater than the company's entire enterprise value of $638 million. This also confirms the notion that I have touted for some time (recently echoed by my Foolish colleague Chris Jones) that the market continues to value this miner as though the massive Prosperity project did not exist. Boasting 7.7 million ounces of recoverable gold reserves and 3.6 billion pounds of copper, I assure you that Prosperity is entirely real. With this injection of capital representing "a significant portion of the equity requirement for the construction of a new mine at the Prosperity property," the market can no longer treat this project like some figment of Taseko's imagination.
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