King River Copper’s soaring share price and innovative underwriting of its soon-to-expire listed options will see the company swimming in cash as it dramatically expands its gold exploration footprint around the Mt Remarkable project.
The East Kimberley-focused gold and base metals explorer is sitting on 124.4 million listed options with an exercise price on 10 cents each due to expire on the 30th of June. They are now well in the money with King River’s share price closing last week at 14.5 cents, making the conversion of the entire series of options a real possibility.
The company’s share price has soared on a run of big news over the past three months from the Mt Remarkable gold project, 200km south of Kununurra and the company’s massive Speewah Vanadium-Titanium-Flurospar project closer to Kununurra.
King River has capitalised on its soaring share price by locking in sophisticated investors to underwrite the conversion of 60 million options, ensuring that at least $6 million in new capital will flood the company’s coffers by June.
In the best-case scenario where all existing option holders exercise their options at 10 cents each, the underwriters are still able to subscribe for 60 million new shares at 10 cents each.
This scenario would see the company’s bank account swell by a massive $18.5 million, providing a plethora of opportunities moving forward for the ASX listed junior.
In a statement to the ASX, the company said it believed that a significant volume of options would be exercised, however the underwriting provided a prudent level of certainty.
The underwriting news coincided with an announcement that King River had now pegged a total of 3,000 square kilometres along trend from its remarkable Mt Remarkable gold discovery.
King River has systematically pegged all of the gold-prospective outcrops of the Whitewater Volcanics in the region, which is the host rock of the Mt Remarkable gold discovery.
The Whitewater Volcanics were surface sampled extensively 30 to 40 years ago in the hunt for another Argyle diamond mine. Many of the soil and stream samples returned indications of gold mineralisation, however they were not followed up.
The latest permit applications by King River means the company now has blanket coverage of a new gold province in the East Kimberley that was identified by the recent exciting results at Mt Remarkable.
King River also announced it had pegged new ground near the Speewah Dome that is prospective for fluorspar, which is one of the key minerals behind King River’s sudden favour with investors.
In February, the company announced its Vanadium-Titanium Speewah project also included a large, high-grade resource of fluorspar, which is used mainly in the manufacture of hydrofluoric acid and aluminium fluoride, a flux for aluminium smelting. Flurospar is in short supply and has just been placed on the US government’s strategic stockpile requirement list.
In the near term however, the immediate focus for King River is on gold at Mt Remarkable. RC drilling at the Trudi epithermal quartz vein is due to resume next month, with a diamond drill rig now ready to start cranking after a break enforced by the wet season. The focus will be on defining a high-grade gold mineralised system with a potential strike length of almost 1 km.
With a pile of cash behind it, King River will be able to set a cracking pace at its East Kimberley gold play that it can now truly call its own.
By Matt Birney
