Daily Metals Mining Rundown and Peer Table - Free Edition for 11 Mar 2025 (after-market ASX)

Today’s metal price and mining company peer group movers after-market ASX/pre-market TSX include:

Mining company announcements incorporated into today’s Peer Table (resource updates, economic studies, changes in attributable project ownership) include:

• 10 Mar 2025 - Nickel, Cobalt, and PGM explorer Alaska Energy Metals (TSXV:AEMC) announced a significant increase in mineral resources for its flagship Nikolai nickel-polymetallic project in Alaska, which nearly doubled contained nickel-equivalent resources since the 2024 estimate to a whopping 29 Blbs NiEq (including nickel, copper, cobalt, gold, palladium, platinum, chromium, iron) grading 0.30% NiEq (excluding chromium and iron), 36% in the indicated category. Excluding chromium and iron and at our estimated 3-month trailing average metal prices, we estimate a 85% increase to the deposit size, to 21.1 Blbs NiEq (70% from Ni, 12% Cu, 8% Co, 8% Pd+Pt, 2% Au). AEMC traded down -2.3% following this news yesterday amid the broader equity selloff, outperforming our nickel explorer peer group median share price performance of -3.9% yesterday, suggesting a slight positive relative impact from this announcement. Nickel is largely out of favor due to its price trading near historical lows (at $7.45/lb Ni) , however the nickel price has been inching up in last few months suggesting that the tide may be starting to turn for the banged-up nickel sector. This huge nickel-polymetallic deposit (excluding chromium and iron) trades dirt cheap at a AEMC market cap/lb resource of $0.001/lb NiEq ($0.21/oz AuEq) - a huge 93% discount to our nickel explorer peer group median market cap/lb of $0.008/lb NiEq ($2.9/oz AuEq). This discount is perhaps due to the project’s relatively low grade of 0.3% NiEq. Although encouragingly, this grade is not out of line of other projects globally and should ultimately be economically open-pittable, especially given the project’s low strip ratio implied by the cross section shown in Figure 2 of the release for the project’s main Eureka deposit. More advanced nickel developer Canada Nickel Company (TSX:CNC)’s feasibility-stage Crawford project has a comparable (M&I) resource grade of 0.25% NiEq (including Ni, Co, Pd, Pt, and excluding iron, chromium, sulfur) and also a low open pit strip ratio of 2.3. AEMC’s Nikolai resource also has a solid 8% share of its metal value coming from cobalt, which is in-line with our cobalt explorer peer group median. Cobalt price has been rising more sharply than nickel lately. Cobalt is up 3% today (and +25% over past month) to 12.23/lb Co. AEMC also trades at the bottom of this cobalt explorer peer group - at a market cap /lb of $0.001/lb CoEq ($0.21/oz AuEq) - an even steeper 96% to this cobalt explorer peer group median $0.021/lb CoEq ($5.4/oz AuEq).