BERAL, INC.  
Andrew G. Racz  
Director of Research  
300 East 54 Street, Suite 26C  
New York, New York 10022  
Telephone: (212) 319-6949  
Fax: (212) 753-1944  

 E-mail: mlikar@aol.com   

RSS Feed   

August 16, 2010

ANDREW RACZ [Q]:   You are the only stock which didn't go down today.

MORGAN POLLIQUIN: [A]:   As prospectors, there's so many ups and downs. As a prospector, we try to keep a stable mental attitude.

Q:   May I first of all ask you, can you define from the investment point of view what is a prospector?

A:   It doesn't matter how good your geological acumen is, you cannot be certain that any individual mineral project is going to have success. A prospector doesn't control where the gold is. He can only look for it. So what we have decided to do is mitigate that risk, as all prospectors do, but at the same time maximize our geological skill set, which we believe is our main skill, and identify new prospects, and put that to work by getting other people to explore our properties at the earliest stages we can find people to do so. And by that means, we can have many opportunities, expose our shareholders, expose ourselves to the success of a discovery on many different fronts at the same time.

Q:   I cannot be a prospector because I would be walking and walking and say, well, I haven't found anything. What skill do you and your family have in setting up this company, and deciding that you would be prospecting all your lives?

A:   I guess that's a very personal question, as you might expect from me, because as I grew up, when I was three years old, as soon as I could walk, I was my father's field assistant. I think biologically we're set up to be prospecting. That's a metaphor for life. Everyone's a prospector in their own way. Our minds are set up to look for opportunity, whether as hunter-gatherers, which is most of human biology. We're designed to look for opportunities. I think it's a pretty natural thing, but I had the luck of being trained from an early age in geology, putting that biology to work in a geological framework. So I think that's the simplest way to describe it is you get a nose for these things.

Q:   But in a physical sense, a prospector goes in a certain territory and looks for elements or hopes to find certain elements, molybdenum or whatever. In other words, it's a dedication which hopefully bears fruit.

A:   That's precisely right. And our methodology is to select areas that are geologically permissive and look for things that currently are unknown. Many prospectors will start right beside an old mine or underneath an old mine, and that's a very valid technique. But we're a little bit different in that in permissive geological terrains we're looking for areas where there are no old mines. That's exactly what this project that you've noticed, the results that brought your attention to our company. This is in an area where there are no old mines, there are no historic workings.

Q:   I remember that just at the time I immigrated to America, in Canada, I think it was the Texas Gulf case, you remember?

A:   Very well. That's a bit before my time but everyone used to go and test their geophysical equipment over this anomaly to tune their instrumentation. Then somebody finally got the courage to drill it, and it turned out to be one of the largest deposits.

Q:   But that was originally a prospecting job, no?

A:   Yes. It was a known alteration zone, meaning a prospective area. But it hadn't had a great deal of work. That's what our philosophy is. That's a good point you make because our philosophy is that there are new things to find. There are things that people have not found. Hemlo, one of the largest gold districts in the world, was found in the Trans-Canada highway in the late 1970s, I think 1978 or early 1980s. And the Trans Canada highway went by it for thirty years before somebody found this. Brand new. The old-timers, nobody had found it. So we believe there are new things to find that nobody knows about yet, and that's our focus. There are wonderful things. You mentioned Mr. McEwen is an associate of yours. He found a wonderful thing underneath an historic mine. And that is a very valid thing to do. We don't contest that, that's not our skill set. Our skill set is finding brand new things through prospecting.

Q:   For instance, the other famous case, Diamondfield in Newfoundland, that was a prospecting job which turned out to be exploration and eventual production.

A:   Absolutely. That was a very unusual thing because they were looking for diamonds, Mr. Friedland was looking for diamonds out there, and he had good prospectors working for him.

Q:   So they were prospectors who were out there at night.

A:   Absolutely. They were forced to land because of bad weather conditions in an area, and they noticed that there was some rusty rock that wasn't diamonds, which is what they were looking for. They had the nose and the good sense to sample this rusty rock, and it turned out to be one of the largest nickel mines in the world.

Q:   I will never forget, it was October 4, 1994. I had dinner with Jean Boule who was chairman of Diamondfield. And suddenly the telephone calls started to come in, and he used his cellular telephone and he sent me out constantly to get more quarters to make telephone calls all over the world. And it lasted for two hours. Actually, he wasn't excited, he was very precise, he was a professional. I asked him, is there some illness in the family that you are excited? He said, oh, no, we discovered something. And he said "base metals". I said what? He said copper and nickel. I said what's the value? Is it more than your $50 million market value? So then something happened, and certainly my life has changed since. But you say it's a prospecting job, and the prospector was very smart, the manager, Jean Boule, was also very intelligent and smart, and they converted immediately to a discovery. The stock ran up, many people became millionaires or multi-millionaires, and some history was made.

A:   Absolutely. That's, of course, our strategy as well. My father and I were both educated in geological degrees. I have a Ph.D. in geology, but really we're prospectors. We got the education that we had, certainly in my case, I got it in order to be a better prospector, not the other way around. Our idea is that we find permissive geological terrains and we look for new deposits in them. This is an example of that coming to a successful conclusion right from scratch. But we have many projects that have this kind of potential, and we're constantly looking for new ones. So it's a strategy we employ, and it's very exciting to be working in new terrains. It's also not very competitive. You can find things that other people aren't out there working alongside you. You can find new things without...if you're working around an old historic camp, the price of acquiring projects can be very costly. But if you're looking for brand new things, there's not a lot of people who are doing that. That's our bread and butter. There's many ways to have success in this industry, and ours isn't the only way but it's the way that is best suited to our skills.

Q:   You told me that once you have what you call a discovery as a prospector, and you identify the merits, etc., usually part of the project is sold to a more powerful company which will develop it and bring it to the marketplace and you retain a percentage of the revenues for your company.

A:   Actually, typically in the past, we have done those kinds of deals, exactly what you said, before discovery is made. So our business model has been to find projects that have the potential for discovery, and then find a partner who will explore the property in return for earning 60% interest. Then we go look for another one. But in this case, we had already had three partners on this property. All three of them had worked on a different part of the property and had not worked in this area and had given the property back to us. So we decided that we still believed in the property and that it had potential, so we put a drill hole into it ourselves.

Q:   Can I just go to a typical case? You think that at the corner of Four Seasons you will find it attractive. Then you find some rich corporation to finance the research and the development, and if it is successful then the two of you jointly find somebody, a corporation, who will finance the full development of the project. In other words, let's say you expect to find molybdenum somewhere. Then you take a partner who would put up the money for 60%. But if the development looks very promising, then you take in a third partner who will carry it into the next stage and maybe sell it to a fourth person. Eventually you only have 10% or 5% of the project, but if it's a molybdenum mine you are going to make a killing for your small company.

A:   Well, typically our deals are that we always retain a 2% undivided NSR that can't be bought out in all our deals. That being said, our typical deal is that we're carried long enough that we would know whether it's going to be something or not for a 40% interest. So that's the structure we work with.

Q:   At the moment, how many of these residual projects do you have on the books?

A:   We have I believe eleven projects where we hold a 2% NSR. I think this is roughly correct at any rate. We have I believe five option agreements with people earning an interest through spending, and I think it's a further five joint venture projects.

Q:   If you had to make a guess, how much is it worth?

A:   That's the billion dollar question. I'll tell you why. This project that we just had this discovery on, which attracted you to giving us a call, people were giving no value to it whatsoever. And now what kind of value would be given to it? We have about 40 properties in our inventory, all of which we think very highly of. So any mineral project that is purely a prospect is one drill hole away from having a much different valuation. And that's the problem. I don't think there is a way to put a value on a project.

Q:   The current project was on your books for zero. What percentage do you have now?

A:   Well, we staked it 100%.

Q:   And that 100%, how much do you think it's worth currently? If you had to value it on your books.

A:   I think it's too early to do that. We've had a spectacular first drill hole, but we have to do a lot more. More work needs to be done before it can be properly assessed.

Q:   Can it be more than a $50 million valuation?

A:   I wouldn't know how people...I would defer to somebody far more intelligent than I am to do that.

Q:   But it's a meaningful asset.

A:   I think a new discovery like this is very meaningful. I agree entirely.

Q:   I remember I was very friendly in Vancouver with Mr. Huntner, Huntner Dickinson. The first day of Diamondfield, which was a very memorable day in my life because I was updating all my friends in Vancouver about my dinner, and I got to him and then he said, well, one drill hole is not a mine! I said but I have to admit I have seen very few going up so far as this one. He liked it. He had a knowledge, of course, which I didn't have. So we have a company. You have about $10 or $12 million cash in the company.

A:   That's right.

Q:   And you have 60 million shares?

A:   We have 50 million shares.

Q:   So at $1.50, the valuation is let's say $70 market value of the company. You take $10 million out for cash and it's $60 million. Then the current successful drill hole may be very big, but let me just use the number $30 million. The remaining $30 million is divided up between your 40 pieces of assets, 2% residual in growing projects, and if this is all worth let's say only $20 million, then you have an extra $10 million for what the company basically is, which can be very valuable. Because what it means is that on August 28, any of your 40 projects or drill holes suddenly can bring in another $50 million program, or you can sell any of your projects to another company. If you have 40 projects, there are 40 drills working every day which can change the future of your company.

A:   I agree with you. Any one of the projects we have, if a discovery is made, will dramatically affect our valuation.

Q:   So in other words, any one of these can make a major change. If you take the world we live in, a commodity world, and the price of commodities has gone up and is going up, because anybody who says that commodities will go down and gold will go down is crazy. You just have to do ordinary statistics. Look at iron ore, and so on. In this world we live in, your drills can change the future of the company, plus, if I may say so, something else. Any day you can get a phone call from somebody influential in business who says, listen, you fellows have a reputation for finding mining assets. You reputation speaks for itself. There aren't too many people like you. Would you look at a certain territory and if you succeed, obviously we would pay for everything and you would get your usual 40%. So on the left-hand side there is a drill, on the right-hand side is on the telephone, and what is important is that your expenses are relatively limited.

A:   That's how we've tried to manage things. Obviously prospecting can be quite expensive and there can be quite long investment times to have success. You don't know when you're going to have success. As you say, any day you're out there you can have that discovery, but you don't know when it's going to happen. So you have to have a way of surviving in the meantime because it's the nature of it.

Q:   But one successful deal can cover you for years.

A:   Absolutely. So what our strategy has been is to not dilute our shareholders to constantly refinance to do this, but rather to try to dilute an interest in the properties. We believe that having a 40% interest in something that's a discovery is quite enough for our shareholders to do very well.

Q:   I got that telephone call a few hours actually, actually from your city, by a public company who has among others a molybdenum mine they just prospected. Their problem is as follows. At a $14 molybdenum price, we are not very economical. But if the price goes to $17 or $18, we have a valuation of one billion dollars. So if you go in the ground level like you with limited capital expenditures and exposure, you always have the opportunity to hit a billion dollars, like Diamondfield. They were in the same stage you're in.

A:   I agree entirely. That's why we're doing this. You have to manage the risk in the meantime, you have to have a business model that allows you to have staying power. That's why we employ the business model we do. That's why we're all in this, is to make a discovery, create some new wealth for society.

Q:   If we go into a higher commodity price structure, in the next two to four years it's possible that you will acquire let's say $100 million more surplus cash, which will be $2.00 per share. Then you have a totally different company, totally different corporate philosophy, because you operate at a different financial level. Very few industries enabled people to go from one end to another. For instance, Apple Computer, and Netflix which has DVDs shown on HBO and so on. This didn't exist ten years ago. Electric cars didn't exist. The point I want to make is that electric car companies get a lot of publicity, although they haven't delivered. Apple Computer is now the third highest market cap in the whole world. But the media talks about Apple Computer and Electric Cars, but nobody in the universe talks about prospecting. In fact, propsecting may be a key ingredient in the 21st century. It's not in the language of common investment in the world.

A:   Of course, in the 19th century it was different, wasn't it? People went from all over Europe to San Francisco and Australia and South Africa. There were gold rushes. But that's over with, and now the industrial revolution and...you can create wealth. There are very few people out there working in the primary industries. The reality is we still need metals. These are the building blocks of society.

Q:   That's what I am saying, that prospecting companies such as yours, which are totally unknown on Wall Street, even the concept, even the industry is totally unknown. In Toronto every year you have a conference and five thousand people turn up. But besides that, nobody talks about your business. But this is a business when you calculate percentage-wise, it's quite plausible to say that here was a company, frankly we are surprised they have $12 million in cash, but five years from now, in 2016 or 2017, they may have a quarter of a billion cash and many major companies are trying to get into the executive offices of the company to do business with you. And to go further, your business will be taught at universities. And you will have foreign partners, because it's not so easy to prospect in Korea. I don't know how it is in Africa, but it is not so easy. So in five years' time, apart from the fact that the stock can be many times higher than it is, you will be an extremely well-known company and a well-known person. Like what's his name in Apple Computer, Steve Jobs. You will be the next Steve Jobs.

A:   I must confess that's not my ambition to be well known, but my ambition is to make some money for the shareholders here through prospecting. I sure appreciate that sentiment. We're working hard to that end, and I think you understand what we're trying to do very well.