Join our daily newsletter At The Bell to receive exclusive market insights
Boss Energy (BOE) took the lead in capital raising this week, completing a $120 million placement and opening a $5 million SPP so it can revive the Honeymoon Uranium Mine in South Australia.
Managing Director Duncan Craib said demand for the placement was “overwhelming”.
The raise was done with shares priced at $2.15 and the company’s shares have been trading above that price, opening at $2.29 this morning.
Meanwhile, fellow uranium play, Aura Energy (AEE) completed a raise for $8.8 million to advance its Tiris Uranium Project.
The company’s CEO, chemical engineer Will Goodall, said the company was on track to make a decision whether to mine the project by Q4 this year.
“The project is economically viable at current uranium prices, so it’s just a matter of upgrading some of the engineering,” he said.
The raise was done at 25c, representing a 20 per cent discount.
“It was a very interesting time to be trying to raise money, we obviously had the Russians attacking nuclear power plants through that period and we saw a big spike in the (uranium) price so the volatility made it a little bit harder to do that placement,” Dr Goodall said.
“We thought it (the discount) would be a good way to support the investors.
“We didn’t raise as much as we may have otherwise.”
Aura’s market cap is $112.48 million and share trade opened at 27.5c this morning.
Helix Resources (HLX) raised $11 million from institutions, and, on Wednesday, launched an SPP for another $2 million to focus on its copper discoveries in the Cobar region. The Deal Room will upload an interview with MD Mike Rosenstreich early next week.
In other capital raising activities, E2 Metals (E2M) secured $8.5 million in a placement to sophisticated and institutional investors. As a result, global resources investor Eric Sprott is to become one of the company’s substantial shareholders, buying in with 17.5c shares.
The money is for gold and silver exploration in Argentina.
Health tech company, Integral Diagnostics (IDX) finalised its $47 million haul from a retail entitlement this week. The money will fund its acquisition of Peloton Radiology.
WT Financial Group (WTL) raised over $3 million at a 22 per cent premium. The funds will support its acquisition of rival Synchronised Business Services (Synchron) in an $8 million deal.
CEO Keith Cullen said the acquisition will see the company amongst the top three largest wealth advisors in Australia.
“We’ve been on a mission for the last few years to really build ourselves into a serious player in the space because we see scale as really important to be able to underride all of the critical supports and advice and guidance that advisors in our network need,” he said.
WT Financial Group has a market cap of about $28 million and shares last traded at 10c.
There have been 23 IPOs so far this year, two this week – Stelar Metals (SLB) today and earlier this week, Many Peaks Gold (MPG), which charged onto the ASX with share trade at times up 30 per cent.
Many Peaks’ Executive chair Travis Schwertfeger said drilling was scheduled to start before the end of the month.
“Within a couple of months we’ll have initial drill results and be making decisions in Q3 of how aggressively we work towards resource drill outs,” he said.
He said the project had been explored by Rio Tinto in the 90s and hit extensive mineralisation but at low grades.
Many Peaks acquired the projects from another company EMX Broken Hill, which retains a 20 per cent interest.
Mr Schwertfeger said these companies may have missed the target.
“We’ve got a 3D model now where we see that potentially they’ve skirted the edges of the best part of the chargability,” he said.
“It’s a big target and they tested it well with the techniques that they had at the time.”
Many Peaks Gold has a market cap of just over $9 million and share trade opened at 23.5c today.
