News

May 08, 2008

After A Turbulent Ramp Up, Noventa Is On The Way To Becoming The Lowest Cost Tantalum Producer In The World

By Alastair Ford

Zambezia province, up in north eastern Mozambique, is true tantalum country. The artisans and small operators who work the ground there do quite nicely, and now some bigger companies are getting in on the act too. “This year we plan to produce 300,000 to 330,000 pounds of contained tantalum”, says Clinton Wood, chief executive of Aim-traded Noventa, which after a year long share price slump still boasts a market capitalisation of nearly £50 million. That’s a decent sized business for the Mozambicans to get on the ground there, given that the country has very little history of large scale mining.

It’s got a bit of history of exploration about it, though. “All our concessions in the Mozambican pegmatite province have been extensively drilled”, says Mr Wood, “by the East Germans and Russians when Mozambique was still the ‘peoples’ republic”. That data is fully available to Noventa, and means that although it has several projects that are technically speaking early stage because no recent work has been done, in fact as soon as the company decides to move on them they will be rapidly...