Thunderbird Resources Ltd (ASX:TBH) recently acquired some outstanding ground contiguous with, and in the same structures as, the ground containing the Hillgrove mine owned by Larvotto Resources (LRV), the market darling of the red-hot antimony theme.
Historical antimony and gold showings are right across Thunderbird’s new tenements, which have been locked up in a private vehicle for years. The ground is ripe for the modern exploration program that starts next month, but for now the stock is trading close to shell valuation.
This enterprise value is roughly $6 million, so there’s plenty of space for the price to gain on exploration success, or increased awareness of these assets.
This value is based on cash of $2.5 million (as of acquisition slide deck), and a post-transaction, diluted share count of 428.2 million (324.3 million on issue, 39.4 million from the transaction, 60 million oppies, and 4.5 million performance rights), for a diluted cap of $8.5 million (at a 2.0c share price).
The top five hold around 18%, top 20 hold around 40%, and there are ~1,000 shareholders with a marketable parcel. Some of the big investors include Jason Peterson, MD at CPS; Tolga Kumova, a well-known successful mining investor; and George Bauk, Thunderbird’s MD.
These projects Thunderbird acquired include ‘Kookabookra’ which looks interesting. But it is ‘Rockvale’ that looks the likely initial value-driver given parts of it host the same geological structures hosting Larvotto’s (LRV) antimony/gold mine and nearby projects.
Source: map below from the ASX acquisition release dated 13 Nov.
The rise of antimony
If you’ve managed to make it through 2024 without hearing about antimony, I’ll defer to the many other renditions of the antimony theme elsewhere, but essentially the commodity playbook is of the ‘Dominant-producer-China-cuts-exports-of-strategic-mineral’ type.
This has sent prices of antimony and associated stocks soaring and is one of the reasons Victoria-based Southern Cross (SXG) has more than tripled in price this year (its Sunday Creek gold project has enough antimony to make it a valuable future by-product, though it’s still at exploration target stage).
China’s move on antimony exports is also a big reason Larvotto is up 600% year to date, to give it a $180 million market cap. Larvotto’s project Hillgrove contains the country’s largest antimony deposit (and one the 10 largest globally), and production is just 12-18 months away. Its reserve grade is 1.2% antimony, alongside a respectable 3.2 g/t of gold.
The study economics are stunning and worth a close look but suffice to say the payback is just two years on their overly conservative assumptions, (or one year at spot prices). Given the metrics on the project, the unique strategic value, and its mine life of just seven years, it could be worth looking around the region for any potentially accretive assets.
Thunderbird is currently rounding up decades of data on 488 square kilometres of ground that has historical occurrences all over it. While we wait for the outcome of that, at least two of Thunderbird’s projects already look super interesting.
Firstly, Thunderbird’s ground directly to the East of Hillgrove straddles the width of the Hillgrove corridor (the structure between the Chandler and Hillgrove faults hosting the monzogranites associated with the antimony/gold geology). This corridor contains the Hillgrove deposit and most of its prospects.
The image above left is from the Thunderbird release and shows the location of the ground (red border) in relation to Hillgrove. The image above right is from the Trigg Minerals (TMG) deck, which shows the corridor better, along with their new ground in the corridor (the acquisition of which saw Trigg’s share price jump 80%).
Trigg has acquired several antimony projects in the last six months to see its share price gain 410% in that time (for a market cap of $28 million), and is a good indication of the trajectory Thunderbird could take on some success.
One of the other eye-catching new Thunderbird tenements is about half a kilometre from Clark’s Gully, where a few weeks ago Larvotto announced half a dozen very strong assays numbers (e.g.: 20 metres @ 8.2 g/t gold equivalent) to bolster the small, high-grade resource there.
Thunderbird had been focused on its Athabascan uranium/copper assets for some time, which have been hard going and led to a falling share price (as per most other uranium explorers in that region). Canadian Winter means that nothing will happen there for the next four to five months.
Meanwhile, the focus is very much on the antimony projects. Thunderbird is well into the review of historical data at Rockvale and Kookabookra and will start boots-on-ground fieldwork in January.
Geochem and geophysics (using drones) is to follow, with drilling after that once priority targets are defined. All of this could provide positive catalysts if it suggests the ground is as good as its immediate neighbour’s.
Things are looking up
The price is still close to where it was pre-transaction, suggesting the market is yet to spot this one, given the prospectivity of the ground and the market interest in the antimony thematic. However, the price has finally broken its painful three-year downtrend at least and has been forming a base for three months on some high volume.
In short, Thunderbird has scored one of the best ‘nearology’ antimony projects on the ASX and did so while it was trading at a ground floor valuation. 2025 could be a much happier year for its shareholders and is clearly one to watch as exploration gets underway.