Santana Minerals Ltd (ASX: SMI) has found more gold at its Rise and Shine deposit in New Zealand, which one broker says has the ability to extend the project's mine life and "bring forward cheap ounces".
The company told the ASX on Monday that step-out drilling at the project, which has a previously released mineral resource estimate of 2.2 million ounces of gold at 2.2 grams per tonne (g/t), "continues to extend the high-grade core and further enhance the opportunity to upgrade Inferred resources to the Indicated category''.
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Brokers see more upside
The news sent the company's shares 2.1% higher to 72.5 cents, but analysts at RBC Capital Markets believe there are a number of triggers that could put a tailwind behind the stock in the coming months.
Positive drill results for Santana announced today … improve confidence and have the ability to extend mine life and bring forward cheap ounces. As a result we expect Santana Minerals to trade up on the back of the announcement. However, we still expect the two major catalysts in the near term for Santana are 1) the Fast Track submission (of the mining proposal), and 2) its approval six months later, which we believe will coincide with Santana's Final Investment Decision and equity raise for the project. We maintain our Outperform recommendation with a price target of 80c per share.
Fellow broker Bell Potter has a speculative buy recommendation on the company with a price target of $1.30.
The drill results released on Monday included 20m at 8.2g/t of gold from a depth of 396m and 8.6m at 4.6g/t from 283.5m.
More good news to come
Santana chief executive Damian Spring said the high-grade core was now delineated to 270m beyond the planned underground mine designs presented in the July 2025 prefeasibility study update.
It's certainly not stopping! We are only at about 250m vertical depth from the portal which is shallow by any modern underground mine standards and we are excited as we look to make bigger step outs with our drilling to test the larger potential of the system.
Drilling is continuing at the Rise and Shine project.
