The final session of the day, hosted by William M. Thomson of Massif Capital, provided a fascinating micro-cap case study that exemplified many of the day’s themes: entrepreneurial leadership, acquiring undervalued assets, and executing a repeatable, value-creating playbook. Jason Jessup, CEO of Magna Mining (TSXV: NICU), detailed how he is re-running the strategy that led to the legendary success of FNX Mining in the 2000s.
The FNX Playbook: A Low-Risk, High-Return Mining Strategy
The “FNX playbook” is an elegant and capital-efficient strategy for value creation in the mining industry, specifically tailored to the unique characteristics of the Sudbury Basin in Ontario, one of the world’s most prolific mining districts. Jason was a key operations manager at the original FNX, which acquired five written-off mines from mining giant Inco in 2002 and grew into a multi-billion-dollar company over the next decade.
The strategy is as follows:
Acquire Non-Core Assets: Identify and acquire fully permitted, past-producing mines from major global mining companies like Vale and Glencore. For these giants, smaller Sudbury assets are often non-core distractions, and they are unwilling to allocate the modest capital required to maintain or expand them.
Leverage Existing Infrastructure: Sudbury is home to a vast network of existing infrastructure, including nine operating mines, two large processing plants, and two smelters. By acquiring mines that can tap into this network, Magna avoids the multi-billion-dollar capital expenditures and decade-long permitting processes required to build a new mine from scratch.
A Simple Business Model: Magna’s model is to simply mine the ore and sell it directly to Vale’s or Glencore’s underutilized processing mills. This allows for rapid restarts and a focus on operational excellence rather than capital-intensive construction.
Self-Funded Growth: The cash flow generated from the first restarted mine is then reinvested to bring the next mine online, creating a self-funding growth engine.
Magna’s Flawless Execution
Jason founded Magna in 2016 with this vision. His acquisition history is a testament to the strategy’s power. He started by buying his first property for just $50,000 in cash. This culminated in the acquisition of the original FNX properties from KGHM in early 2025. In a transaction that was eight years in the making, Magna acquired assets with a replacement cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars for just $5 million in cash and $4 million in stock and deferred payments.
The company is now executing its growth plan. Over the next three years, it intends to bring three mines into production, funded largely by internal cash flow. This has the potential to generate $100 to $200 million in annual cash flow for a company with a current market capitalization of approximately $600 million. The strategy is also flexible; the unique geology of Sudbury allows Magna to pivot between mining copper-rich or nickel-rich zones depending on which commodity offers better economics. The entire enterprise is led by Jason, an entrepreneurial CEO with deep operational expertise and significant skin in the game, owning approximately 5% of the company.
Magna Mining serves as a powerful real-world example of the search fund model applied to a specific industrial niche. Jason is the expert operator with a specific thesis, and the major mining companies are the “retiring founders” who view these smaller assets as non-core. It is a textbook case of creating value by exploiting a structural inefficiency that is ignored by larger players.
Let’s go deeper.
Transcript
The following transcript has been lightly edited for readability.
John Mihaljevic: This is a very interesting small-cap mining story out of Canada. It’s no longer just a story. They’re executing extremely well, as you’ll see in just a moment. I’ve coincidentally known of Jason and Magna Mining for a few years now because one of their big shareholders is Dundee Corporation in Canada, which is a very knowledgeable mining investor. That’s how Jason came on my radar and I was impressed by the fact that he has done it before, and now has tremendous skin in the game. Over this time that I’ve followed the company, you’ve executed exactly as one could have expected if you were very optimistic. Congratulations on that, and I think there’s a lot of runway left for Magna. Let’s hear a little bit about that. Will, over to you.
Will Thomson: I’m going to let Jason provide the background because he can obviously tell the story a little bit better than I can. My fund invests in energy, materials, and industrials. One of the things that we come across all the time is mining firms that go off into the middle of nowhere, drill a hole, build a mine—it takes five to 10 years and it’s a very long, torturous process for the investors. What’s interesting about Magna and what Jason is doing is they have a playbook from a previous success, and Jason will talk about that, and they’re now repeating that not only with a lot of the same people, but with some of the same assets. What they’ve also done is they have acquired assets that nobody wanted, so they’ve paid great prices for them. And then, as John said, they’re executing their process very well. It is a very different business model than most mining firms.
I brought Adam Lundin here a couple of years ago, and he is a guy who goes off into the middle of nowhere, drills holes in the ground, and builds a giant mine. This is a very different business model. I think this is interesting, especially for this audience, where mining might be a little intimidating because a great deal of expertise is necessary. There are also huge timelines. This is a very different story. I think it’s particularly interesting to share with people who maybe don’t invest in mining very frequently.
Magna is based out of Sudbury, Canada. For those of you who don’t know, Sudbury was hit by a meteorite about 1.8 billion years ago, and there’s a whole bunch of metal there. It’s nickel, copper, and platinum group metals. One of the biggest mining success stories out of Canada in the last 20 years was a company called FNX. Jason was part of the FNX team, and this is Jason rerunning the FNX playbook. With that, I’ll hand it over to Jason. Maybe you can give us a little bit about your background and then tell us what the FNX playbook is and how you guys are rerunning it at Magna.
Jason Jessup: Sure, thanks a lot, Will, and thanks, John, for the kind introduction. I am really honored to be here today. I started out in mining in the mid-90s with an engineering and operations background. I settled in Sudbury, Ontario, around 2000 and went to work for a mining company there called Inco. Some of you may have heard of Inco; it was a big Canadian mining company that was around for about 100 years and was acquired by Vale. I worked there for about five years in underground mining operations, managing operations for them.
In 2002, a junior company called FNX acquired five past-producing Inco mines. These were mines that Inco had written off—written down to zero—and FNX did a deal where they could invest capital into exploration to earn 100% of these properties. I had been hearing about them, and in 2003, FNX reopened the McCreedy West mine. It started to generate a little revenue from mining and did lots of drilling. They made a few discoveries. In 2005, I left Inco to go hang my coveralls at the McCreedy West mine. I became the manager of operations there. We were able to grow production, make more discoveries, and by 2010, brought two more mines into production, doing that primarily through cash flow generated from the McCreedy West mine. We were acquired in 2010 for about $1.8 billion. FNX was the best-performing stock on the Toronto Stock Exchange from 2000 to 2010.
I stuck around for a little bit longer. We became a company known as Quadra FNX. I left in 2011 to get more exposure to the capital markets side of the business. Shortly after I left, Quadra FNX was acquired for about $3 billion by KGHM, the Polish mining company.
I remained in Sudbury, traveled for work, and kept in contact with some of my former colleagues. By 2014 or ‘15, I recognized that these properties that FNX acquired from Inco, which we created so much value out of, were now non-core to a much larger company. KGHM was not investing capital into them. One mine shut down in 2014, and I could see the writing on the wall for at least one more of the mines where they were not investing the capital. Mines need to have capital reinvested to prolong their lives. That’s where I started to have the idea that these assets had come full circle.
Working with FNX in Sudbury was the best experience of my life. It was just a great culture, and it really showed me how things could be done differently in Sudbury. I started to recognize that we could do this FNX model all over again. We can come in with an entrepreneurial approach. We do not need to build big Cadillac mines that cost billions of dollars. We can do things quicker and faster, and we have all the infrastructure right here in Sudbury to do it, with a mineral endowment better than almost anywhere else on Earth.
That’s what inspired me in 2016 to found Magna. Now, I was not and am not an overly wealthy person, and I had never been a CEO of a company before, but I’m very entrepreneurial. I set out, formed the company, and went out to start consolidating non-core assets in the Sudbury Basin with the vision of creating the FNX business model.
We acquired our first asset in 2017. It was at a time when nickel prices were very low, at decade lows. Copper prices were low, and there were some good deals to be had. I bought the first property, which was a permitted past-producing open pit mine called Shakespeare, for $50,000 cash on closing and a commitment to make $50,000 annual payments for three years, give 5% of the company post-first financing, and a 1% royalty that we could buy back 100% of for $500,000. That’s what really started the company.
We grew as a private company, doing small raises, and eventually went public in 2021 with a valuation of about $17 million. We raised $7 million in cash, did some exploration, and continued to pursue the vision of consolidating non-core assets in the Sudbury Basin. We were successful in 2022 in acquiring our Crean Hill property. Crean Hill, much like the other FNX properties, was a past-producing Inco mine with a great production history, and we bought it for $16 million in cash. We were a $20 million market cap company, raised $20 million at 27 cents, and got that acquisition done. Four months later, we raised another $18 million at a buck ten and continued to grow the company.
On February 28th of this year, we closed the acquisition of those former FNX properties from KGHM. Today, we’re about a $600 million company with about 200 employees, a producing copper mine, and four fully permitted past-producing mines in Sudbury. I think we’re just getting started.
Will: Jason really buried the lead there on the KGHM acquisition. The assets were former FNX, so they’ve made a lot of money for people in the past. And I believe it was $5 million in cash and what else?
Jason: $5 million in cash, $2 million in shares of Magna, and then a $2 million cash deferred payment at the end of next year.
Will: I went up to site in May.
Jason: In May.
Will: And they started showing me around these mines that they’ve now acquired for $5 million. By the way, they’ve already put them into production. That’s one of the interesting things here. The infrastructure exists, so you can put it into production right away. They started showing me some of the equipment that came along with this acquisition, one of which is a very fancy machine called an XRT machine. Afterward, I asked around and tried to see how much I could acquire one for. The machine itself is about a $2 million machine. There were other assets acquired at the same time that are worth multiples of what you guys paid.
Jason: The replacement cost is in the hundreds of millions of dollars when we start looking at hoists, shafts, and infrastructure. For equipment and fixed plant machines, we’re probably looking at somewhere in the range of $80 million. This acquisition was pretty much eight years in the making. Once we had a CA signed and were in the data room, it took us about 26 months to get the deal agreed upon, the definitive agreement signed, and closed. It was a long process, and throughout that, we really ground them down on price. We started high and just kept grinding it down.
We have that ability because we know these assets; we know that they don’t necessarily fit with major mining companies, especially major mining companies that have assets in other parts of the world. Often, for example, Vale makes most of its money on iron ore—direct ship iron ore from Brazil. When they’re looking at deploying capital globally, Sudbury may not look as attractive as a direct iron ore shipping operation in Brazil. Those operations in Sudbury don’t get the capital they need. When you don’t provide the capital to continue developing the mines, they start to deplete. This is the same thing that was happening with KGHM.
We recognized what these mines needed. They are in great shape in many respects, much better shape than they were when FNX originally acquired them in 2002. But these are just some of the additional benefits. What this really provided for us was a platform for further growth because we see other great opportunities in Sudbury with the major mining companies, Vale from Brazil and Glencore from Switzerland, which own the other operations in Sudbury. There are nine operating mines in Sudbury, two very large processing plants, and two smelters. Those are owned by Vale and Glencore. Our business model is really simple. We explore, we mine the ore, and we sell the ore to Vale or Glencore’s mills, which allows us to ramp up production and restart mines without needing to invest capital in the processing infrastructure.
It’s quite elegant. This is the way FNX had been mining, and the McCreedy West mine has been operating for over 22 years. We acquired a lot of great infrastructure and equipment for a very low price. We have a track record of making smart acquisitions in Sudbury. I live there. I know the people and I know these operations. It’s what I know, and that’s why I’ve chosen to commit my career to this endeavor.
Will: In many regards, the search fund introduction was good. It’s in some regards a search fund in Sudbury where he’s picking up assets that are being retired and rehabbing them. Talk a little bit about what the next couple of years look like. You’ve made these acquisitions and put together a real asset base. A lot of the assets are almost ready to go, but not quite there. What does the growth path for the next couple of years look like?
Jason: We have owned these KGHM assets for about seven months now. As I mentioned, one of them is in production. Because it had been starved of capital, we’re investing the capital, doing the work underground, and investing in equipment and additional diamond drilling to get it to where it needs to be to be sustainable and profitable long-term. We should be there sometime in the next three to six months. It’s not a lot of capital; we’re talking maybe $10 million. From that, we believe the McCreedy West mine can generate—it’s not a big mine—let’s say $20 to $30 million a year in free cash flow, which we can then reinvest into other parts of the business.
We have a pretty healthy balance sheet right now. We will be investing another $15 to $25 million next year in our Levack mine. It’s the next mine we’re going to bring back into production. Levack was really the flagship of FNX. I had the privilege of going there after McCreedy West to bring a new discovery, a very high-grade copper deposit, into production in 2010. There’s still a lot of very high-grade copper there. We’re going to be working on getting Levack back into production with a focus on copper, with some exposure in the future to nickel. Nickel is a metal that’s a little out of favor right now, but there’s an opportunity, as we’re getting very little value for our nickel.
Once we have Levack up and running, we have our third mine, the Crean Hill mine that we acquired in 2022, which is fully permitted, ready to go, and needs about $60 million to get back into production. Over the next three years, we would look to have three mines in production, largely from either existing treasury or internally generated cash flows. Then we’ll look at our fourth and fifth mines that are again permitted and when to bring those online. Potentially, we could have three to four mines in production in Sudbury in three to four years. This doesn’t include any opportunities for other accretive acquisitions in the basin, of which there are a number.
There have been over 40 mines that have historically produced. Most of these are owned by Vale and Glencore. There are many of these that would be considered non-core. Both Vale and Glencore are looking at ways to fill their processing plants, which are very much underutilized right now. We are one of the solutions to provide them with the feed that they need. There’s a real benefit in them working with us to potentially sell us other non-core assets that we can, much like McCreedy West, bring back into production, invest the capital, and provide feed to their mills.
Will: For someone who invests in mining on a regular basis, I only ever date stocks. That’s just the way it is. I’ve got to get out in three to five years because that’s the life cycle for a mining investment. What’s interesting about this is the opportunity for continuous reinvestment of capital by acquiring these assets that are forgotten on the balance sheets of Vale and Glencore. How many assets do you think you can acquire, and do they start to scale up in terms of size?
Jason: Absolutely. There’s a lot we’re looking at right now. I can’t say for sure, because if I had tried to answer that question in 2019, it would have been five or six years before we could get the KGHM deal done. I can’t say when things will get done. But what I can say is there are at least four or five more non-core property acquisitions that we are in discussions on. Much like our acquisitions have scaled—from our first Shakespeare acquisition that I was able to pull $50,000 out of my savings to buy (which is probably our lowest priority property right now), to Crean Hill, and now KGHM.
Going forward, we’ll be looking for much bigger opportunities: much bigger mines that could have decades of good-grade production. But for one reason or another, their owner views them as non-core and in some cases, it’s because of the capital outlay that they just do not want to invest capital in new projects in Sudbury because they have a use of capital somewhere else. For us, it may make a lot of sense, especially when we can approach how to construct a mine much differently.
Typically in Sudbury, the major mining companies, Vale and Glencore, are building state-of-the-art mines. The kind of mines that they want to take people on tours and show them that they have the latest technology and everything is done to the highest possible standard. When we built our mines with FNX, we took a slightly different approach. We had portable trailers for office buildings. We had very simple shops on surface to service the equipment. We did everything in such a way that it was functional but not extravagant. We were able to build things much cheaper. Having that humility and modesty in how we do things, I think, really speaks to the culture.
At Magna, we’re taking the same approach. We’re not there to build the Cadillac mine; we’re there to build the most profitable mine that makes sense for the deposits and get the quickest return on capital. That’s what it’s all about, so we can start producing cash flow and then reinvest that into other projects and growth.
There are two mines that were built in Sudbury in the mid-2000s. One of them was the Podolsky mine that FNX built. This was a discovery they made around 2003, and by 2005, we were sinking a shaft on it. In 2003, there was another discovery made called the Nickel Rim South deposit by Falconbridge, which later became Glencore. They studied it for four or five years, then spent another four or five years building it and missed the entire boom in the metals cycle. They produced most of the ore through the lows of the 2010s, and then it shut down this year. It took them many years to get a return on investment for that. The Podolsky mine, we made decisions quickly, we sunk a modest shaft, we got into the ore right away, and had a payback in six months. That’s how we do things differently.
Will: Speaking of missing the cycle, you started at FNX. The nickel price environment was similar, but the copper price environment was very different. How do you think the FNX playbook does going forward in this very different commodity price environment?
Jason: That’s a great question. Right now, Sudbury has a very unique geology in that there are copper-rich zones with lots of precious metals. When I say lots of precious metals, in some cases, an ounce per ton of precious metals, where potentially 50% of the value is in precious metals. Then there are these completely separate nickel zones, which will have some copper and a little bit of precious metals, but primarily nickel. You can target copper zones or nickel zones separately.
Right now, we are only focusing on our copper zones because that’s what makes the most money, and nickel prices are a bit depressed right now, so we’re not focusing on it. Nickel is cyclical and we will see high nickel prices again and when it booms, it usually booms very quickly. We have the ability to turn on those nickel zones because all we need to do is notify the mills that we’re going to start mining nickel. Most of these areas are already developed, and we can start shipping it to them in as quickly as eight to 10 weeks. We have that flexibility to take advantage of different commodities.
With high gold prices right now, there’s a huge opportunity for us to take advantage of areas with higher precious metals. We can pivot and take advantage of that. I think the model that we have, selling ore and not needing to invest tens of millions of dollars in additional capital for increasing our processing capacity, gives us the flexibility to move very quickly.
Will: Just for context, precious metal companies these days are usually talking about grams per ton as opposed to ounces per ton. You’ve got some very high grades in Sudbury.
Audience member: I might have missed this, but what are the recurring capital needs for the mines going forward?
Jason: It really varies, but it’s a fairly low capital intensity. A mine that would have an EBITDA of, call it, $80 million a year might need $10 million of sustaining capital to be invested consistently. This will vary depending on the deposit. To bring three mines into production over the next three years, with sustaining capital, we’re looking at spending something in the range of $100 million.
Audience member: What is the average life of these mines at this point? Also, once they come into production, roughly how much cash flow do you think they’ll generate at the current strip?
Jason: Regarding the McCreedy West mine, one of the unique things about mining, especially Sudbury-type deposits, is that you’re often replacing reserves on an annual basis. The McCreedy West mine started production after having already produced for about 24 years with Inco; they had shut it down for six years. FNX restarted it with three years of life-of-mine reserves in front of it in 2003, and we’re looking at probably having three years of reserves ahead of us 22 years later.
I can’t tell you for sure, but if I had to take an educated guess, I’d say the McCreedy West mine probably has eight to 10 years in front of it. It could be more, but it’s been running for almost five decades. The Levack mine was a mine that had operated up until 2019 when KGHM put it on care and maintenance. It had produced almost continuously for over 100 years, producing more than 65 million tons of ore. With what we have in front of us right now—and this is not what we would call compliant reserves yet, as we’re in the process of going through that—I would think it has something in the range of another 15 to 20 years in front of it. We’ll put out compliant reserves, but a lot of times we just need to continue drilling underground as we advance our developments. For our Crean Hill mine, we did a study in 2024 that indicated a 13-year mine life at a fairly high production rate of about 700,000 tons of ore a year.
Those are the three main ones that I can speak to. But Sudbury has been around—mining started in the 1890s—and has mines operating right now that have been operating continuously for over 100 years. It is a pretty unique camp and the ore goes extremely deep. We’re mining shallow right now, but there’s a lot more to be discovered.
Oh, and the cash generated. As I said with the McCreedy West mine, these are forward-looking statements, but generally, I would expect that at current prices it would produce $20 to $30 million in cash flow a year. The Levack mine has a tremendous torque to these high-grade copper zones that we have. We came out with some great drill results a few months ago. If this all develops out—and we’re doing technical studies—it has the potential to be $100 million a year in cash flow. Our Crean Hill mine would be somewhere between $50 and $80 million, depending on the parts of the mine in the year, based on the study we did. Conceivably, based on our understandings and assumptions, we could see producing a potential $100 to $200 million a year in cash flow from these three mines in three years. That goes a long way in advancing the other initiatives and M&A that we’re looking at.
Audience member: Jason, could you comment on your safety track record compared to the industry?
Jason: That’s a really great question. One of the things our industry has been criticized for, and rightly so in many cases, is a lack of respect for people’s safety and for the environment. Some of you may have heard of some terrible tailings dam failures and things like that. In my career, and I’ve been doing this now for about 30 years, safety has come a tremendous long way. I can only really speak to Ontario, Canada, where most of the work I’ve done has been, but we have an impeccable safety record. We’re a small team with a small mine. We keep a close eye on things. On a national standard in Canada, we’re definitely in the lowest 10th percentile.
As an industry in general, safety has improved tremendously. We don’t see the critical injuries that we would have seen 25 years ago. It’s quite rare, at least in Canada. Other parts of the world are going to be different. But it’s a huge part of our culture. At one time, when I started in mining 30 years ago as a young man, people that worked underground were paid a production bonus, but people used to call it “danger pay.” There was this mentality that ‘I’m getting paid well to go underground to get production, whatever it takes. If that means I have to take risks, that’s expected of me.’ That was totally false back then, but it was a perception. Nowadays, that’s absolutely unacceptable.
I’m really glad to see the industry has changed. When people do things right and do proper risk analysis and risk assessments on the work they’re doing, they not only work safely, but they also ensure that we work efficiently. They ensure we don’t damage equipment and that we can be productive. It comes hand in hand with running good operations. Safe operations are well-run operations. I would say we’re doing really well. I’m really pleased with it and it’s a big part of our culture.
John Mihaljevic: Jason, maybe talk a little bit more about the alignment of incentives. You mentioned you weren’t a rich man when you started this, but I believe you still have high single-digit equity ownership here. How do you see this playing out? I think you are very much aligned with the shareholders.
Jason: I have about 5% of the company, and I’ve bought into almost all of the financings. In the early days, when we were a private company, I never received any kind of salary, not even shares in lieu of salary. It wasn’t until 2021 that I actually started getting paid. My wife’s a teacher, and every couple of months she’d say, “When are you going to start paying yourself?” I’d say, “Well, as soon as we do the next financing.” But I had all these people who trusted me personally as a private company with a vision of where we wanted to go, and I said, ‘I can’t take their money and pay myself so I can go on a vacation. I need to create value in the company for that.’
That really drove me to be very aligned and to respect every shareholder because they believed in me personally, and I didn’t want to let them down. I own about 10.5 million shares and have never sold a share. I’ve said publicly and I’ll say it again: I’m not going to sell a share until we’re over a billion-dollar company, and if I do sell shares then, it will just be so I can exercise options or pay my taxes on them. I really do believe it’s important. I like to think of myself as an entrepreneur, and I’m doing a business that I know. I really liked the previous presentation on search funds and found that fascinating because that’s basically what I did here in Sudbury: go out and find these opportunities that others missed, buy them for very cheap prices, and do the right things to create value.
Will: And speaking of finding opportunities, I think Magna is a great example of the opportunities that Will finds with his research.
Audience member: Jason, you own 5%. Who are some of the other key owners of your company?
Jason: Dundee Corp, which John mentioned earlier. Jonathan Goodman runs Dundee. He’s one of our directors, and they own about 20%, so they’re a big cornerstone shareholder. We have a number of other institutional shareholders and some very high net worth fund managers who manage private wealth that own between 4% and 8%. But Dundee by far is our biggest cornerstone shareholder.
Will: My fund owns a teeny slice, but for us, Magna is about 8% of our fund.
Audience member: I have a question on corporate governance. You mentioned incentives. How important do you think that is, and do you think that’s something the industry has been misaligned with historically and has caused its bad reputation?
Jason: I think it has been misaligned at times, for sure. I think some people get overcompensated for poor returns. I’m not an expert on the matter and am very much inward-looking at the way we do things. We had very small salaries for all of our executives in 2021, 2022, and 2023, and tried to incentivize people more with stock options to get that alignment. We want to make sure that all of our executives have skin in the game, which aligns them with shareholders and with the vision of growing the company. I think we’ve done that pretty well. I can’t really comment on how other companies have done it, but compensation numbers, when you look at average compensation numbers, have gone up a lot over the last few years. I don’t know if it’s always representative of performance.
Will: Just to comment on that quickly: Since the peak of the last commodity supercycle and the subsequent fall over the last 10 years, especially with some of the bigger firms like the Barrick Golds of the world, there were definitely incentivized acquisitions that didn’t necessarily make sense, and management teams got paid for them. Over the last 10 years, the entire industry has recapped its balance sheet. The incentive structures have been changed fairly dramatically. Some of the mistakes that were made, especially on the acquisition front, are unlikely to be repeated, not that they won’t occur again. The evidence of that is that a lot of good, recent acquisitions have occurred at the market rate. In a no-premium acquisition of one company by another, management isn’t making a ton of money on that. The acquisition is occurring for strategic and thoughtful reasons associated with the industry. There has absolutely been an improvement in the quality of governance.
Audience member: I have a question about Vale. They’ve had serious issues and have been in divestment mode for non-core assets for six or seven years. I’m curious why these haven’t traded yet. Is it because they’re smaller and there are only a few specialists like yourself who would buy them, or is there another reason? They’ve been selling a lot of things around the world.
Jason: Are you referring specifically to Vale’s assets in Sudbury?
Audience member: No, I’m referring to Vale’s non-Brazil assets. After Brumadinho and all the issues they had—the liabilities were around $14 billion—they’ve been divesting a lot of assets. They have not been acquiring much outside Brazil, and I was just curious why Vale’s assets in Sudbury haven’t traded yet.
Jason: That’s a good question. Vale did some restructuring around their business, separated out their base metal mines, created Vale Base Metals, and brought in a new CEO. I think they have a strategy for what they want to do with that. Ultimately, I think they’d like to take it public as a new company. How that all plays out in Sudbury is yet to be seen. But like any large mining company, they only have so much capacity for projects. They would much rather run four or five large projects than 14 small projects. That may play very well for us, but I can’t speak too much more on Vale’s strategy.
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