News

January 21, 2008

GMA Resources Expects Gold Production To Build Steadily This Year

Alastair Ford

“What I really want to do is get the stock price up”, says AIM listed GMA Resources’ chief executive Doug Perkins. “We should be drilling, and we should have some very sexy results”. As a mining executive he’s by no means unique in coming out with that old refrain, but GMA has come a long way with its two Algerian gold projects since it tried and failed to engineer full production from the smaller of the two using only a pilot plant. That failure was under previous management, and Mr Perkins is still fairly candid about why it didn’t work. The Tirek project, he says, “was started as a pilot plant operation. We ran it for a while, but we couldn’t make it go. It was really too small as a standalone project. As an add-on, yes it can be cost effective”.

 

And an add-on is what it now is, playing a significant second fiddle to the company’s primary asset Amesmessa, some miles to the south. Both should be up and running by the end of this year. The mine at Amesmessa is already built and, although still in the test phase, is already producing at commercial levels, while start up at Tirek should come sometime this autumn.

So Mr Perkins’s aspiration for positive movement in the share price isn’t just based on the necessary...