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Lumina Q&A

After yesterday’s Ottotrans™ edition, your humble scribe is asked via mail:

Doesn’t Lumina already belong to the Chinese?

Which is a fair question (especially as the person who wrote the mail lives in Peru and follows Cajamarca things more closely than stocks and shares). Here’s the answer.

There’s Lumina and there’s Lumina and there’s Lumina. This particular project in Argentina (Taca Taca) is still an indy-owned junior exploreco that trades under the ticker LCC.v. What Lumina (as a group, roughly speaking) has done over the last decade or so is first gather together a whole bunch of deposits and sell them off one-by-one to the big boys. They picked up very prospective concessions when things were cheap and copper was out of fashion, then advanced them. When copper became fashionable again, they cashed in (another example is their sale of the Relincho property in Chile to Teck, there are others besides, full list available on request). In a nutshell, Lumina had the vision when others didn’t and as a result has made a veritable shitload of money… and good for them too, winners who won. There are others involved but the brain at the bottom of the enterprise is Ross Beaty, who also founded Pan American Silver.  


So to answer your question, what happens is that when the deposits are sold to whoever, the local wholly owned subsidiary is spun out and then the name is often kept. Therefore for example, the Chinese-owned Galena in Cajamarca still goes under the name “Lumina Copper SAC”.

For the rest of us, it’s worth remembering just how insular the junior exploreco world is. For example, what may be obvious about the words ‘Lumina Copper’ to us is a whole entangled story to the vast majority, including people who follow the metals industries from different angles. Thus ends today’s food for thought, metalhead.

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