My double down on Lucara
Here are three things that we thought You Should Know this morning:
Rachael Singh has joined us in Toronto and will be anchoring our presence there with two key roles: as VP of Corporate Development, she’ll be expanding our biz dev team across Canada; and she’ll be working with me to meet and get to know all our Investment Advisors in Toronto as we host clients coming to Bay Street.
Rachael Singh
We’re thrilled to have this bright, articulate and personable capital markets professional in such a key role for us in Canada’s financial capital. I’ll be joining her in Toronto in early September as we bring our first client of what is a busy fall season. Stay tuned for details.
2. Lucara Diamond rough patch (LUC-T) is one of our favourite mining stories and one with a very large amount of support in our network across Canada and in Europe. The past several weeks have been rough on Lucara, as the company announced in mid-July that the schedule for the planned underground expansion of the Karowe diamond mine in Botswana has been stretched out with the delay adding significant costs to the project. On Monday of this week the company announced the CEO Eira Thomas was stepping down and William Lamb, who was Eira’s predecessor, will be coming back to take the helm of the company. We wish Eira all the best in whatever is her next adventure - and remain a huge fan of hers.
There are lots of moving parts to this story and, like everyone, we’ll wait to see what happens when Lucara has to renegotiate a debt facility in the first week of September. We’re working on getting an update from the new CEO as soon as we can.
In the meantime, I’m increasing my personal position in this story. Lots of reasons for that - drop me a line if you’d like to know why.
3. On the good news front: two of our companies came through with some stellar news over this past week:
Sundie Seefried’s Safe Harbor Financial (SHFS-Q) released Q2 results on Monday that showed absolutely stellar top line revenue growth (+147%) and similar strong numbers in key metrics like deposits, accounts and loan book - and a strong cash position of US $8.2 million on June 30th. All of this was tempered by a significant write-down of goodwill and other one-time costs. There’s no doubt this story has legs if it can start to drive some net income to the bottom line, announce a dividend, and continue to expand its loan portfolio in the underserved, legalized US cannabis market. If you’d like to arrange a call directly with Sundie, let us know.
Justin Holland’s Eguana Technologies (EGT-V) announced this morning the first of what should be a strong of upcoming agreements with large utilities seeking to join Eguana’s Smart Battery program. This is a significant milestone for Eguana, as Justin made very clear on his meetings with us over the past several weeks. If you’d like a call with him and an update, please let us know.
Thanks for your continued interest and support.
Rick Peterson (He/him)
Chair