Instos flood into OzAurum’s $12m IPO, retail investors follow

Special Report: Institutional and sophisticated investors were banging down the door to get into gold explorer OzAurum’s IPO, which was heavily oversubscribed.

The institutional and sophisticated bookbuild closed early in December 2020. Following that strong result, the 25c-per-share offer opened to retail investors in mid-December and is due to close this Friday, January 15.

Depending on the final total raised under the IPO, OzAurum will light up the ASX boards in early February with a market cap of between $26.6m and $28.6m trading under the ticker ‘OZM’.

Even before launching its IPO, investor interest in OzAurum was strong, with the company securing pre-IPO funding to acquire 100 per cent ownership of two advanced gold projects, Mulgabbie and Patricia, in a +30-million-oz (Moz) gold province in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia.

More specifically, Mulgabbie covers 10km of a greenstone belt in one of the richest and most prolific gold-producing belts in Australia.

The Norseman-Wiluna greenstone belt hosts a number of major mines including Granny Smith (+2.5Moz), Wallaby (+7Moz) and Sunrise Dam (+15Moz). The Patricia project is a high-grade gold project open at depth.

The portfolio of strategic gold assets sits adjacent to the Carosue Dam mine owned by Saracen Minerals (ASX:SAR), which is in the process of merging with Northern Star Resources (ASX:NST) to create a new top-10 global gold company worth $16bn.

The Carosue Dam mine has produced some 1.5Moz so far and is only a stone’s-throw away from OzAurum’s tenements.

Chairman Jeffrey Williams said OzAurum was a story of “persistence”.

“The managing director and CEO, Andrew Pumphrey, began securing tenements at Mulgabbie, Western Australia, from as early as 1990,” he said in the company’s prospectus.

“Over a 30-year period, Mr Pumphrey, together with his associates, compiled a portfolio of tenements that comprise the Mulgabbie project and Patricia project.”

The cash raised in the IPO will be used to fund exploration at the two projects.

Post-IPO, OzAurum intends to undertake a very large drilling program, with up to 50,000m of aircore, 50,000m of reverse circulation and 20,000m of diamond drilling planned with the aim of defining a resource of more than 1Moz.

This story was developed in collaboration with OzAurum, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.

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