On the desk of North American Tungsten CEO Stephen Leahy there's a framed quotation from U.S. president Calvin Coolidge that goes to the heart of his company's success.
It begins: "Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence."
Persistence, Leahy says, is his middle name. Acquiring an aging but major world-class asset in the 1990s, the Cantung tungsten mine north of the Arctic circle, keeping it when cash was tight and commodity prices flat, and then experiencing all the tribulations of bringing a junior mining company into production, required a deep belief in what he was doing and the determination to see it through.
"It's quite an ordeal," he says.That ordeal has paid off for Leahy, chairman and third largest shareholder. North American Tungsten has made the No. 1 spot on the Vancouver Sun's Top 100 list of fastest-growing companies for the second year in a row, an unprecedented feat.
In 2007, North American Tungsten's Cantung mine in the Northwest Territories was fully operational for the first time. Production was up 20 per cent, sales revenues increased 15 per cent, operating cash flow climbed 300 per cent and the junior mining company came close to being profitable, cutting losses to $1.2 million from $2.7 million in 2006.
[...]
Tungsten has exceptional properties: a high melting point that makes it useful for filaments in incandescent lights, a near-diamond hardness needed in the manufacture of high-grade drill bits and saw blades, and a density higher than lead, yet without lead's toxicity. Read the full story
No comments:
Post a Comment