The uranium market has been in a five-year bear market that shows no indications of recovery, in part because utilities are betting prices will stay low and therefore are in no hurry to secure future supply.
Dev Randhawa, chief executive of Fission Uranium Corp., said they need to start buying in big amounts within the next three years to have their reactors going. But he’s no clue precisely when that purchasing will happen.
“Until utilities buy, the location price is not going to move,” he said within an interview.
Fission, certainly one of Canada’s few junior mining testimonials of latest years, can withstand this bear market because it raised $82 million from state-owned Chinese firm CGN Mining Company Ltd. in January. The company’s Patterson Lake South (PLS) discovery in Saskatchewan’s Athabasca Basin is one of the world’s best uranium finds in decades.
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But it had been a turbulent ride for that company last year. Shareholders voted down its planned merger with Denison Mines Corp., along with a retail shareholder later tried to replace Fission’s directors in a proxy fight.
Randhawa said that effort was nonsense from day one and never had a chance of success. He noted that certain of the people behind the proxy fight, Ben Ainsworth, was CEO of a company called Alpha Minerals Inc. that Fission acquired a few years ago. Fission and Alpha was once co-owners of the PLS discovery, but Randhawa said that Alpha shareholders came to him requesting a takeover, and Ainsworth continues to be bitter about this.
He noted that Fission’s directors got re-elected with a larger percentage of shareholder votes finally December’s annual meeting than they did the prior year, when there wasn’t any effort to unseat them.
“I call it the phantom fight,” he said. “All it did was cost us $300,000.”
