I "Azure" You This Project Looks Exciting!

Azure Minerals (ASX: AZS) strikes again! Yes the sweet darling of Ms Rinehart and Chilean conglomerate SQM, not long ago center of a duel of titans for the control of the company, has published on February 13th an impressive set of lithium mineralisation intersects:

·       112.9m @ 1.63% Li2O

·       152.3m @ 1.15% Li2O

·       112.0m @ 1.24% Li2O

·       106.1m @ 1.30% Li2O

·       125.2m @ 1.00% Li2O

·       112.1m @ 1.11% Li2O

Including thick and juicy interim intersects, most notably a 24.6m intersect @2.17% Li2O and a 13.8m intersect @2.02% Li2O.

The results are not shallow, with the closest intersect to surface starting from 166m deep, however the company had reported previous intersects much closer to the sunlight with still very nice lithium grades over 1% Li2O (refer to ASX announcements on 10/10/23, 15/11/23 and 15/01/24). These results so far seem to anticipate a maiden geological resource statement large enough to support the development of the project and make the company a sweet darling for investors (no wonder why Ms Rinehart and SQM were flexing their muscles so hard to gain control of the project).

But the happy story is not just made up of the rock in the ground. As beautiful as it may look, a pegmatite rock with such elevated lithium content but full of nasty contaminants would actually be more like the ugly sisters at the prince’s ball in the Cinderella story: full of makeup in beautiful dresses, but dark and ugly in the inside. However, for much of the joy of the project owners and early investors, back in October 2023 Azure also published a set of outstanding metallurgical testwork results, reporting spodumene concentrate grade of 5.59% at a 82.37% recovery through a flotation process…now this is indeed very impressive! Yes it's very early stages and much more testwork ought to be conducted, but as a start these results are not bad at all.

This company’s share price has not been strange to the set of good news they have reported in the last year, with current price sitting at AU$3.63 (at close of 13/02/24) from AU$0.31 on 15/02/23, that is a whopping 11.7x appreciation in just one year, navigating very well a disastrous year for lithium when even stablished market players have been losing big on their market cap due to the steep decline in raw material and chemicals prices.

I don’t know you, but I’ll be eagerly waiting for the release of a maiden geological resource statement (targeted to Q2 2024) and see what it will do to the share price of this promising company…