Survival in indifferent market will depend on tapping alternative financing options
Newsletter writer and mining analyst John Kaiser sounds a little dejected as he describes the utterly bleak state of the mining industry today. “The phones are completely dead, nobody cares,” says the editor of Kaiser Research Online. “Companies can’t raise money, it’s like a complete dying sector.”
Kaiser made a now-famous prediction last year that around 500 juniors were bound for “extinction” because of an inability to raise capital, low share prices and negative sentiment on commodities.
As of mid-May, that number has grown: Of the roughly 1,800 publicly listed TSX and TSXV companies involved in mining or exploration and listed in the KRO database, 694 had less than $200,000 in working capital — basically the amount needed annually to maintain a listing. Kaiser adds that about 70% of all the companies in the KRO database are trading at below 20¢.
“It’s starting to feel like 1999, and we still had several more years to go after that,” Kaiser says of the last prolonged downturn in the industry. “That’s when the dot-com stuff was taking off and I remember subscribers mocking me for still talking about resource stocks, they were history — technology was the place to be.”