A new Nevada-focused precious metals explorer — which counts Canadian billionaire investor Eric Sprott as its biggest shareholder — has launched a $7 million initial public offer ahead of an expected ASX listing in May.

Brisbane-based Metals479 positions itself as a precious metals company — and has taken a “bit of a shine” to silver in particular.

“There’s not that many [silver-exposed] assets on the ASX in comparison to say the Toronto market, where there are hundreds of companies large and small that have an exposure to silver,” chairman Frank Terranova told Stockhead.

“We believe the underlying fundamentals for silver remain strong.”

Silver is predominantly used in coins and jewellery as well as other general-use items, such as cutlery because of its antibacterial properties.

Metals479, which was seeded by Mr Sprott along with other similar sophisticated investors, has its hands on an extremely high-grade silver project in Nevada.

Prior drilling at the Corcoran silver and gold project has delivered grades of up to 4103 grams per tonne (g/t) silver. Anything above 50g/t is considered high grade.

“I always put it down to opportunity and an element of luck,” Mr Terranova said. “The vendor, being Resource Capital Group out of Toronto, was probably in a position where they had to do a deal quite quickly and therefore the opportunity arose.

“With traditional greenfield exploration plays the trail of the bread crumbs as to where you should be looking can be quite scarce. This opportunity, why it was attractive, that trail of bread crumbs is extremely thick. So we know where we should be drilling.”

Nevada project attracts the buyers 

The Corcoran project is so attractive that Metals479 has already had several offers for it.

“The interesting thing was there was no shortage of appetite for companies wanting to put unsolicited proposals to buy the asset off us, but that’s not where we’re really at,” Mr Terranova said.

“We want to build a company, and this really is one of the foundation style assets to list the company.”

Although Metals479 has had a lot of interest from North American investors, the company decided Australia was the better place to list.

“We did test the appetite in Toronto only to see what it was like a few months ago,” Mr Terranova said.

“We could of raised the money in five minutes, but I was extremely concerned about aftermarket support because it’s a very congested space for juniors. The ASX is a good market to give companies their start.”

Metals479 is aiming to release a resource for Corcoran by the end of this year.

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