Amur Minerals Corporation - Re: AMC Stream Log - One western entrepreneur for whom...

One western entrepreneur for whom there are compensations in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forward policy in Ukraine is Robin Young, chief executive officer of AIM-quoted nickel play Amur Minerals (AMC). His company is expected shortly to produce significantly increased reserve figures for its Kun Manie project in Far East Russia, near the Chinese border. Political uncertainties and investors’ impatience have contributed to the fall in Amur’s shares. At 2.98p these are well off their 12-month high of 8.5p and a mortifying 90 per cent down from their 2006 float price of 33p, but the fall in the Russian rouble prompted by the Ukraine crisis has at least cut the estimated cost of securing a long-awaited production licence from $818,000 (£481,000) to $655,000. Young, who expects the new figures to imply a hefty increase on the current 830,000 tonnes of nickel equivalent (including platinum and palladium), with nickel, an essential component of stainless steel, at 0.54 per cent and copper at 0.15 per cent, will as yet declare no timetable on a project which has been preoccupying British Virgin Islands-based Amur for at least seven years. But observers suggest the company could take Kun Manie into production within three to four years if the Russian authorities grant the licence -- which does not have to be approved by Putin but could be considered by the office of Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev -- by Christmas or soon after. Amur, which obtained 100 per cent of Kun Manie before Russian law changed to limit foreign ownership of projects, reckons it could produce at the rate of 20,000 tonnes a year or closer to 30,000 tonnes if it can improve communication in this remote region. The company, which lost £2.3 million last year, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Californian lighter-than-air craft maker Aeroscraft, headed by Igor Pasternak, to use modern-day Zeppelins to ship material to and from Kun Manie for a third of the $140 million needed to build a 300-km. highway. That would ease the pain of what analysts estimate could be a $600 million capital cost for Kun Manie, against Amur’s present stock market value of £12.8 million, if it sought to go it alone. The entrepreneurial Young, a geological engineer who has spent 23 years in the former Soviet Union, argues Kun Manie could live with a current nickel price of $8.50c a lb or $18,770 a tonne, though he contends it is likely to increase to $9.50c a lb. or more. The price, which surged from $3,730 to $54,050 a tonne between 19987 and 2007 before falling below $14,000 in 2013, has rallied on an export ban on unprocessed nickel ore imposed this year by key producer Indonesia. Young maintains the time it would take for Indonesia to establish its own processing industry could prolong the ban. Clearly, uncertainties, financial, logistical and political, remain. But, if progress continues as Young suggests, Amur’s battered shares could bounce.