Yesterday, IsoEnergy Ltd. (TSX-V:ISO | OTCQX:ISENF) (the “Company” or “ISO Energy”) issued a news release detailing our discovery of a new zone of uranium mineralization on our Larocque East property which we acquired from Cameco in May this year. ISO has performed strongly off the back of this news and along with other uranium equities is trading up off the back of Cameco’s major news today.
Cameco just announced the indefinite shutdown of the McArthur River mine which was previously the world’s largest mine, accounting for 11% of global supply. Recall, in January they put the mine on temporary closure for 10 months. This shutdown is clearly very difficult for the Province as it involves significant layoffs, but it is the correct call to make and is driven by economics.
This is hugely constructive for the supply-demand fundamentals and is representative of the state of the industry which is in a structural crisis. Incentive pricing for current mines is orders of magnitude higher than the current market price and has been the case for many years.
The overall result of this shutdown is that it indefinitely removes 11% of global supply while simultaneously requiring Cameco to source that amount of material from the market to fill contracted sales positions putting a tremendous strain on a market which already appears in deficit. Recall – the DOE agreed to not sell into market for balance of this year, Yellow Cake PLC just purchased 8Mlbs out of the market, etc. An estimated 25-30% of global supply has been removed from the market since 2016 – that is unparalleled in terms of quantum compared to any other commodity in their worst corrections.
Again, the significance of this action taken in terms of its beneficial impact on the supply-demand fundamentals cannot be overstated.
The read through for ISO is that our land position in the prolific eastern Athabasca Basin will have great value as the uranium price continues its rise. We have been doing all of the things needed to benefit from this emerging bull market. We have continued to acquire highly prospective projects at bottom-of-market prices and have undertaken considerable exploration work to move towards a discovery. This is evidenced by our most recent news release where we announced a significant new uranium mineralized intercept at our Larocque East Project. We continue to have a very tight capital structure with only 56 million shares on issue and much of that is tightly held by supportive shareholders and in particular the key players in the sector being NexGen, Cameco and Orano.
The spot uranium price has recently broken a 12 month high and today had its largest single day jump of $1.43+ to $25.56.
We continue to position the company to benefit from this nascent uranium bull market.