They tell me that if you start a post title with “A modest proposal” it sounds all Swiftian and 18th century ironic, thereby creating that intellectual amusement scenario preferred by the discerning bloggists. Well yeah, all good, except that I’m actually serious about this.
1) It’s fairly obvious that Great Panther Silver (GPR.to) (GPL) is a loss-making mining company. After all, these days you don’t even have to look at the pre-tax or net earnings…
2) …because it can’t even make a profit on its mine operations.
3) And it’s also pretty obvious why that is:
4) We could string this out to a few thousand words, but the crux of the matter is that GPR can’t make a profit with silver this low and that’s not a guess, it’s now proven. And with 2015 cash cost guidance at GPR higher than the silver spot price, the writing is already on the wall for this year. Therefore the question arises as to just why it’s continuing to produce. Surely it would be smarter to take its non-renewable fixed asset resource and put it on care and maintenance. What’s the point of going to all that trouble of digging up the silver and other credit metals when you can’t do it at a profit? I mean, forget the padded out G&A, forget the tax, don’t even include the money it’s been wasting on what they optimistically call “exploration”, this company cannot even make a profit in the most basic of baseline levels, that of 1) dig out rock 2) put it through machine 3) sell the result to someone waiting at the gate.
In fact, the only people making any money are the directors of this loss-making show, who are relaxed about running their company at a loss as long as those six figure salary cheques keep hitting their personal bank accounts. The CFO, the COO, the VP Expl all with tasty cash packages and Robert Archer all by himself pulls down half a million a year in cash, aside from all the extra benefits. And it’s not as if they have a whole bunch of shares and skin in this game either, as all the company directors put together own less than 4% of GPR.to stock. All that cash, none of the responsibility, nice work if you can get it, right Bob?
Common business sense is to close down a mining company that can’t cover its fixed costs, one that cannot even run at gross profit. And common business sense also demands that you kick out fatcat directors for doing a bad job. These richly paid wastes of time don’t care as long as they get their wedge, so the only way to protect shareholder value is to run a proxy on Archer and his band of good for nothings, vote them out, ask them to be careful the door doesn’t hit their asses on the way out, stop fracturing company cash into their back pockets, mothball GMC and Topia, then wait until silver prices can justify their mining before turning the lights back on.