Cygnus (CY5) was an okay lithium explorer back in October 2024 when it decided to get on board the unfolding copper thematic by striking a merger deal that delivered it the Chibougamau copper-gold project in Quebec.

The company had a $60 million market cap on the merger deal being announced.

By the time the merger was completed in February 2025, Cygnus’ market cap had grown to $110m. Earlier this week a $232m (17.6c a share) agreed scrip bid from AIM-listed Central Asia Metals (CAML) landed.

So the switch in focus to high-grade copper-gold in Canada has paid off nicely for Cygnus.

The growth in the company’s value in well under two years says as much. It reflects the company’s success in growing the high-grade resource in a rising copper market, with the red metal currently up 40% on in its CY2025 average.

Despite the growth in the company’s value, the bid from CAML nevertheless represents a 60% premium to Cygnus’s pre-bid price of 11c a share, highlighting what has been said here before –  there is a clear disconnect between short-term equity valuations and what the longer view-taking corporate/private equity types are paying for copper assets.

In Thursday’s market, Cygnus was a 12.7c stock. Taking into account the usual weakness in a bidder’s stock, the imputed value of the offer from CAML is now 16.8c a Cygnus share for a 53% premium on the pre-bid price.

It could well be argued that Cygnus is worth more than 16.8c ($221m). But when it was back at 11c a share before the bid on the usual concerns around development timelines and project financing, the equity market was saying that was what it was worth.

It has taken an industry player like the dividend-paying CAML (it produces copper in Kazakhstan and zinc-lead in North Macedonia) to come along and say the market had got it wrong by slapping down a 53% premium bid.

It’s a tale that has been played out in the fast hollowing out of the ASX-listed copper sector in recent times.

BHP acquired OZ Minerals with a 49% premium bid and the Salim Group of Indonesia paid a 79% per-bid premium for South Australian copper developer Rex Minerals.

Later came the 57% premium bid for Mongolian copper explorer/developer Xanadu Mines, Harmony’s 32% premium offer for MAC Copper and the 168% pre-bid premium takeover of New World Copper (NWC) by private equity group Kinterra.

The outlier there is the premium for NWC. There is a tale in that too as it was CAML that kicked of a bidding war with a 78% pre-bid premium only to walk away and leave NWC to Kinterra with its 168% pre-bid premium.

From that it can be taken that CAML’s bid for Cygnus is line with all of the other pre-bid premiums that have won the day in recent times. But it also says it is also prepared to walk away when it thinks things have got too heated.

Like in the NWC situation, an interloper could well emerge in the Cygnus situation. But as the stock remains well below the imputed value of the CAML offer, that does not seem to be a happening thing.

Chalice:

Chalice (CHN) was well and truly kissed by the exploration gods back in 2020 when it made the Gonneville discovery on the western margin of the Yilgarn craton, all of 70km north-west of Perth.

Early modelling for a project came up with the potential for annual production of 220,000oz of palladium-platinum-gold, 7,000t of nickel, 8,000t of copper and some cobalt over an initial 23 years utilising only 50% of the resource.

So it is world-scale all right but Chalice has been left by the market to drift along with a $540 million enterprise value while it works its way up the Lassonde Curve by completing a definitive  feasibility study (H2 in CY27) ahead of financing and a final investment decision (CY28).

Palladium is to be the main revenue spinner (51% on Chalice’s base assumption of US$1,300/oz), followed by nickel (22%) and copper (17%). By rights, the stock should be trading higher than it is on the recent strength of nickel and copper prices, with palladium currently in line with the base case assumptions.

But the share price is what it is as the ascent of the Lassonde Curve continues.

Is there a better time then to inject some exploration blue sky in to the Chalice story? Can it be blessed twice by the exploration gods?

Chalice is out to find out at what it describes as an “exceptional” copper-rare earths target called Deep Blue some 15km south-east from Caravel’s (CVV) 3 million tonne namesake copper project in WA’s Wheatbelt.

The target area is concealed by residual agriculture soils with limited outcrop, which is why it sits where it sits as a virgin drill target.

Chalice said highly anomalous copper-rare earths results had been returned from rock chips taken in an area of isolated outcrop within a 2.5km long, coherent-copper-moly-silver soil anomaly.

It added that strong coincident magnetic and gravity anomalies indicate the presence of a large scale hydrothermal system with skarn-style affinities over more than 2km.

An initial 10-hole RC program is expected to start in coming weeks, subject to regulatory approvals. Chalice traded lower in Thursday’s broad mining sector sell-off so it can be said that there is nothing in its share price for what could come from its upcoming Deep Blue adventure.

PhosCo (PHO):

Talking about pending exploration results, PhosCo (PHO) signed off an exploration update during the week with a mention that further results from its Gasaat phosphate project in sunny Tunisia would be announced shortly.

Gasaat is already a world-scale project and it seems that whenever PhosCo goes drilling the bigger it gets.

PhosCo was last mentioned here in October last year when it was a 7.1c stock for a market cap of $32 million. It has taken off since to 18c in Thursday’s market for a market cap of $96m.

Apart from the growing resource base from exploration successes, the market’s appreciation of Gasaat got a move on once a spurious tenure challenge was seen off by PhosCo.

More recently the realisation that phosphate supplies with a North African address are preferable to those with an address in the Middle East has sharpened the attention of the market and industry players on PhosCo. It has long been suspected that taking in to account all of the above, Gasaat will eventually end up in the hands of one of the world’s big fertiliser groups.