Australia’s Southern Cross eyes Canada for dual listing

Australia-focused company Southern Cross Gold (ASX: SXG), which scored the best gold assay this week in The Northern Miner’s Drill Down top 10, plans to also list in Canada. The listing in the Great White North reverses the recent trend of Canadian companies listing on the ASX for access to its hotter market.

The planned listing, although the exact exchange wasn’t named, would start in this year’s third quarter to join more than 40% of the world’s public mining companies on the Canadian stock market, Southern Cross said on Tuesday. The company holds the Sunday Creek project and the Redcastle and Whroo joint ventures in Victoria and the Mt. Isa project in Queensland.

“A dual listing in both Australia and Canada will provide direct exposure to a diverse class of global investors,” managing director Michael Hudson said in a release. “It includes those North American investors who have over the last seven years directly benefited from the huge capital growth that has come from the Victorian goldfields.”

With about 70% of Southern Cross’ shareholders located outside of Australia, the company is betting the dual listing will more efficiently allow Australian and North American investors in on the company’s growth and high-grade gold story. The Sunday Creek project posted hole SDDSC107 which cut 0.7 metre at 3,511 grams gold per tonne from 684.3 metres depth. The hole’s first 30 cm graded 7,330 grams gold.

Southern Cross closed 20% higher on Tuesday in Sydney at A$2.05 apiece ($1.83), valuing the company at A$184.1 million. Sweden-focused Mawson Gold (TSXV: MAW), which owns 51% of Southern Cross, gained 12% to close at 65¢ in Toronto for a market capitalization of $197.5 million.

Mawson Gold

Mawson Gold says it intends to distribute its shares in Southern Cross to Mawson shareholders this year. Mawson holds the Skellefteå North gold discovery and a portfolio of historical uranium resources in Sweden.

The Sunday Creek project, about 60 km north of Melbourne, lies within 194 sq. km of exploration tenements. It used four rigs to drill 19,000 metres on the Apollo, Rising Sun, Golden Dyke and Christina targets from September. Ten holes are being processed or in progress, the company said. The host rocks are intensely-altered in a steeply dipping zone where gold and antimony form in a relay of vein sets.

“When observed from above, the host resembles the side rails of a ladder where the sub-vertical mineralised vein sets are the rungs that extend from surface to depth,” the company said. “At Apollo and Rising Sun these individual ‘rungs’ have been defined over 600 metres depth extent from surface to 1,000 metres below surface, are 2 metres to 30 metres wide, and are 20 metres to 100 metres in strike.”

The company’s drill program has discovered 45 ‘rungs’ defined by high-grade intercepts to more than 7,000 grams gold. Step-out drilling is aiming to uncover the potential extent of this mineralized system.

The project is in the Melbourne structural zone in the Lachlan fold belt where the Sunday Creek mineralisation is an interbedded turbidite sequence of siltstones and minor sandstones, the company said. They metamorphosed to sub-greenschist facies and folded into a set of open north-west trending folds.