Providing industry leading services in:
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Integrated MineWater Management
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Groundwater Supply
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Dewatering & Depressurisation
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SurfaceWater Control
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Water Systems Engineering
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Groundwater & SurfaceWater Modelling
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Managed Aquifer Recharge
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Project Approvals
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Compliance Reporting
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Management Solutions
We pride ourselves
on being very good
miners – this is where
our reputation is. We’ve
demonstrated our
operational excellence
at Paulsens in the last
three years, where we
have turned an unloved
asset into a silk purse.
What’s the journey been like so far
for Northern Star?
It’s been a rapid rise (although everyone’s on the slippery slope
at the moment going the other way). It’s not even three years
ago that we bought the mine. We were a one-cent company, a
million dollar shelf company. At the height of last year we got
up to a $650 million market cap, $1.60 a share. We’re back to
60
cents today and a $300 million market cap, but it’s been an
extraordinary rise. It’s also been a lot of fun along the way, but a
lot of hard work. We probably haven’t sat back and appreciated
what we have achieved, and we probably won’t because we’re
still too busy trying to grow the company further.
We pride ourselves on being very good miners – this is
where our reputation is. We’ve demonstrated our operational
excellence at Paulsens in the last three years, where we
have turned an unloved asset into a silk purse. And we’ve
done it by being very good operators on the ground. We’ve
lifted productivity at the mine 100% in the last two years and
we’ve dropped our total costs per tonne by 20-30%. Against a
backdrop where rates were increasing, we were one of a handful
of companies going the other way – lifting production and
productivity, and dropping costs.
In another few years I hope we’re a company with multiple
operations across Australia in gold, and hopefully we’ve created
the next Normandy Mining. At the moment we’re a single
asset company, but we’ve got very high ambitions to grow this
into a much larger company in the coming years. We want
to be the second or third biggest gold producer in Australia
behind Newcrest.
What do you see as the number one
priority for the WA resources sector?
Cost inputs into resources have increased a bit, but it’s really
been the lack of productivity that’s hurting the industry.
I have no problem paying higher labour costs as long as we
get improved performance out of the operations. We have to
increase productivity and lower costs. Once we do those
two things, we’ll bring back profitability into all sectors in
resources, and once you bring that back, you create an
investment opportunity for people to put money into. Not just
in gold, but in all other commodities. When we can
demonstrate an investment case that people want to put
money into, that’s when the sector will change.
Two big issues are the massive capital drain going out, and
how much money is going back to shareholders. If you couldn’t
give money back to shareholders when gold was $1,700 per