News

October 05, 2009

Alkane’s Rare Rise, With More To Come As The Gold News Sinks In

By Our Man In Oz

No chief executive complains about his company’s share price rising by 43 per cent over three months, let alone 165 per cent over nine months, even if the market is possibly moving up for the wrong reason. That’s why Ian Chalmers, managing director of the rapidly re-emerging Alkane Resources, is happy to take a win from exposure to the rare earths industry when the best recent news flow from Alkane has really been about gold. “You certainly don’t hear me complaining,” he told Minesite today when discussing the company’s price rise from A16 cents in January, to A30 cents in July, and then up to A43 cents this week. “We’ll take a higher price anyway we can, and if rare earths is what the market wants then we’ve got a lot of it at our Dubbo project.”

Rated as one of the world’s biggest undeveloped deposits of exotic materials, such as zirconium and niobium, and rare earths such as dysprosium and terbium, the Dubbo project, located near a town of the same name in western New South Wales, is one of the long-term assets in Alkane. Over the past 10 years it has been in and out of the headlines as demand for exotic metals rises and falls. The latest driver which has put Dubbo back in the news is China’s insatiable demand for the materials which...