These gold explorers drew investor crowd to Perth mining seminar

Investor interest in gold companies remains strong if the turnout for the Media & Capital Partners’ Gold ‘n Brews Investment Seminar on Thursday is any indication.

Thanks in part to Western Australia’s relaxed restrictions, investors flocked to the conference, which was organised in conjunction with Vertical Events, to listen to presentations from four successful gold explorers with a combined market cap in excess of $600m at the Northbridge Brewing Company in Perth.

There is also little doubt that the high gold price, which has extended its record rally to a fifth straight day, has helped drive interest.

Saturn Metals (ASX:STN) chairman Brett Lambert told Stockhead that he had been in the mining industry for almost 40 years and couldn’t remember it being as exciting as it was now.

“All the companies presenting have got very solid discoveries and they are getting good market recognition,” he said.

“The fact that there is support for exploration again is so important, exploration doesn’t happen without investors investing in it and when you see some of the tremendous discoveries that have been made in the last year or two, it reminds people why you should invest in junior explorers.

“And it empowers people like [Saturn managing director] Ian [Bamborough] to get out there and make more discoveries. It feeds on itself.”

Gold companies hit the mark

Saturn was the first to present, touching on its 781,000oz Apollo Hill project in a world-class gold province close to existing infrastructure.

While the current resource is a big tonnage, low-grade deposit, recent exploration has returned high-grade intersections along with visible gold.

This has provided the opportunity for follow-up exploration that could upgrade both the scale and quality of the project.

Meanwhile, Apollo Consolidated (ASX:AOP) touched on its progress at the 1-million-ounce Lake Rebecca gold project.

It noted that successful drilling in 2020 highlighted clear high-grade upside below its existing resource at the Jennifer, Laura and Maddy mineralised structures.

Apollo says there is also potential to further expand and upgrade the Duchess and Duke deposits.

Antipa Minerals (ASX:AZY) also provided an overview of its projects, which have attracted three separate farm-ins from Rio Tinto (ASX:RIO), Newcrest Mining (ASX:NCM) and IGO Limited (ASX:IGO).

These companies have already committed to spending $20m in exploration over the next two years and could potentially spend a cumulative $150m in exploration expenditure.

Antipa also highlighted the growing interest in the Paterson thanks to Rio’s Winu copper-gold-silver discovery just 45km from their Citadel joint venture.

The mining giant recently defined a maiden resource of 503 million tonnes grading 0.45 per cent copper equivalent at the project with a higher grade component of 188 million tonnes at 0.68 per cent copper equivalent.

Rounding up the presentations was Musgrave Minerals (ASX:MGV), which touched on the continued high-grade results from exploration at the Starlight discovery within its flagship Cue project.

Both Starlight and the new White Light lode are outside the existing Break of Day resource of 199,000oz of gold and are expected to add resources to the company’s existing inventory.