How do Site Visits Help Evaluate Mining Investments?

I think one of the main differentiators that you from a geology perspective, as well as other members of the investment team really bring to the table is actually doing site visits. We've talked before, you and other members of the team have visited more than 40 countries and on average you do up to 30 site visits a year. Can you talk a little bit about what that evaluation process looks like when you go to these mine sites?

Rather than read off a site visit evaluation checklist, maybe it's easier to give you a couple of anecdotes to illustrate some of the points. There's some things that you can only see through the lens of experience. I'll anonymize the companies in the examples perhaps, but I remember going to a site where a project was under construction and the company had told the public that they were going to be producing concentrate in 3 to 6 months and they had a percentage of completion out there, which when I went and looked at it, there was just no way. They didn't have nearly enough structural steel out. There wasn't concrete floors in the workshops.

Delays on mining projects are a big deal. They cost money. Often you've got debt providers who want to get paid back. So, I formed an opinion that that was not going to happen and we were able to adjust accordingly.

There's times where, well at all times, culture is important, and culture is not something you can pick up across a 20-minute speed data conference. It's one of the things you see better when you're in it. There's been times where we visited a site thinking that the company was overvalued and maybe a potential sell, but you get there, you talk to management, you realize that there's a shared vision across different departments. You see the mill foreman talking about how he's got an inexpensive fix that can lift recoveries. You see the technical services team working together to optimize the mind plan in real time because there's changes day to day and everyone's not arguing about where the goal line is. They all know that they're arguing about how to get there fastest.

There's times we've left site thinking it's a sell but realizing it's not, it's actually an add. These guys do have some uncertainty in what they're doing, but they're all pulling in the same direction, and we needed to be part of that. So these are some soft things and hard things that you can only get from site visits.