With investors hurdling toward gold as our Government prints more money, I am reminded of a story that many gold enthusiasts may already know. It’s a story about a real life gold super hero whose deviance of conventional wisdom turned a failing corporation into one of the world’s largest gold producers.
Many of you who have been a part of Equedia Weekly for a long time will have already heard this story before. But with gold hitting yet another all time high and our many references to the Gold Super Hero in the past few weeks, its only fitting for us to revisit this incredible story one more time.
Rob McEwen wasn’t a miner. He was a young man following his father’s footsteps into the business world. Like his dad, he had a fascination for gold.
After years of growing up hearing stories around the dinner table of miners and prospectors, he finally got his shot.
One day, he stepped into a takeover battle as a white knight and emerged triumphantly as majority owner of a mine in Red Lake, Ontario. Here he stood at the head of the boardroom table filled with a room full of experienced senior geologists, all of whom doubted his ability to lead this company. Who could blame them? He was a mutual fund manager turned CEO of a gold corporation overnight.
This company was: Goldcorp
But it was hardly a dream come true. The company he had taken over was plagued with negative news and on the brink of failure. The miners were on strike and they were overwhelmed by lingering debts. The gold market was contracting and the mine’s operating costs were exceedingly high, forcing them to cease mining operations. Unless they found evidence of new gold deposits, the fifty-year old mine was about to be shut down along with the company.
McEwen knew that the mine had potential. “The Red Lake gold district had 2 operating gold mines and 13 former mines that had produced more than 18 million ounces combined,” he says. “The mine next door had produced about 10 million ounces. Ours had produced only 3 million.” So he sent his geologists packing with $10 million dollars and a plan to drill in the most remote and deepest parts of the mine.
A few weeks later the geologists returned. With smiles on their faces, they broke the news to McEwen that would save Goldcorp – at least for another few years. They had found results signalling new deposits of gold as much as thirty times the amount they had been mining at the company. But that wasn’t enough.
The senior staff continued years of further exploration in attempts to find a more accurate depiction of the gold’s value and location. Despite the expertise and experience among the staff of senior geologists, their efforts proved stagnant. It had become obvious that something critical needed to change if they were to secure a future for Goldcorp. They needed to act faster.
Exhausted and uncertain about Goldcorp’s future, McEwen decided to take a break for some personal development. He attended a MIT conference in 1999, where corporate presidents from around the world had come to learn about advances in information technology. Perched up in his chair, he listened as the lecturer talked about how Linus Torvalds built a masterpiece computer operating system by revealing his code to anonymous programmers all around the world on the internet.
Without the help of thousands of anonymous participants, the Linux system would have cost millions of dollars to produce and would have taken years. But it didn’t.
Then it hit him. If his senior geologists couldn’t find the gold in Red Lake, maybe someone else could.
McEwen wasn’t a miner. He didn’t think like one either. But that was his strength. So he rushed back to his corporate head office in Toronto to share his idea of “open sourced” mining.
McEwen wanted to take all of the data the company has spent creating in the last fifty years and he wanted to share it openly with the world by posting it on the internet: “Then we’ll ask the world to tell us where we’re going to find the next six million ounces of gold.” 
At first, Goldcorp’s geologists were appalled at the idea of exposing their fifty years of secret data to the world. And they had good reasons to be. The mining industry is an intensely guarded business and geological data is to miners what treasure is to pirates. Giving this sort of data away could not only subject you to takeover risks, but can also imply that your company no longer has the ability to move forward on its own.
Despite the inherent risks, McEwen decided to push forward and in March 2000, he launched the “Goldcorp Challenge.” They posted every bit of information they could on their 55,000-acre property through their website and setup a contest offering $575,000 worth of prize money to the participants that could show Goldcorp the best methods and estimates on their property.
McEwen knew this strategy entailed big risks. But the risks of continuing to do things the old way were even greater.
“Mining is one of humanity’s oldest industrial pursuits,” McEwen says. “This is old economy. But a mineral discovery is like a technological discovery. There’s the same rapid creation of wealth as rising expectations improve profitability. If we could find gold faster, we could really improve the value of the company.”
And improve the value they did. Within weeks, submissions from over one thousand virtual prospectors in over fifty countries crunched the data. But geologists weren’t the only participants.
Mathematicians, graduate students, consultants, and military officers all submitted entries. They had, “applied math, advanced physics, intelligent systems, computer graphics, and organic solutio
ns to inorganic problems.”
Not only had the contestants identified new targets on the Red Lake property, they introduced Goldcorp to state-of-the-art technologies and exploration methodologies, including new drilling techniques and data-collection procedures, and more advance approaches to geological modeling.
McEwen had harnessed a technological trend that most in the industry would have shunned. As a result, he turned his destined-for-failure $100 million company into a company today worth over $27 billion – even in our currently depressed market.
McEwen’s courage to challenge the mining industry’s safe-keeping of geological data reveals to us that change can lead to astonishing results.
With today’s change in technology and commodities price rally, this may be the opportunity of a lifetime for many investors and mining and resource juniors. New technologies and high prices are allowing historically great projects to resurrect themselves from the grave.
And it will be the juniors that dig them out and breathe life back into the markets. Don’t miss this run.
All the best,
Disclaimer and Disclosure
Equedia.com & Equedia Network Corporation bears no liability for losses and/or damages arising from the use of this newsletter or any third party content provided herein. Equedia.com is an online financial newsletter owned by Equedia Network Corporation We are focused on researching small-cap and large-cap public companies. Our past performance does not guarantee future results. Information in this report has been obtained from sources considered to be reliable, but we do not guarantee that it is accurate or complete. This material is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities or commodities.
Equedia.com has been compensated to perform research on specific companies and therefore information should not be construed as unbiased. Each contract varies in duration, services performed and compensation received. Equedia.com is not responsible for any claims made by any of the mentioned companies or third party content providers. You should independently investigate and fully understand all risks before investing. We are not a registered broker-dealer or financial advisor. Before investing in any securities, you should consult with your financial advisor and a registered broker-dealer. The information and data in this report were obtained from sources considered reliable. Their accuracy or completeness is not guaranteed and the giving of the same is not to be deemed as an offer or solicitation on our part with respect to the sale or purchase of any securities or commodities. Any decision to purchase or sell as a result of the opinions expressed in this report OR ON Equedia.com will be the full responsibility of the person authorizing such transaction.
Please view our privacy policy and disclaimer to view our full disclosure at http://equedia.com/cms.php/termsr. Our views and opinions regarding the companies within Equedia.com are our own views and are based on information that we have received, which we assumed to be reliable. We do not guarantee that any of the companies will perform as we expect, and any comparisons we have made to other companies may not be valid or come into effect. Equedia.com is paid editorial fees for its writing and the dissemination of material and the companies featured do not have to meet any specific financial criteria. The companies represented by Equedia.com are typically development-stage companies that pose a much higher risk to investors. When investing in speculative stocks of this nature, it is possible to lose your entire investment over time. Statements included in this newsletter may contain forward looking statements, including the Company’s intentions, forecasts, plans or other matters that haven’t yet occurred. Such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Further information on potential factors that may affect, delay or prevent such forward looking statements from coming to fruition can be found in their specific Financial reports. Equedia Network Corporation is a distributor (and not a publisher) of content supplied by third parties and Subscribers. Accordingly, Equedia Network Corporation has no more editorial control over such content than does a public library, bookstore, or newsstand. Any opinions, advice, statements, services, offers, or other information or content expressed or made available by third parties, including information providers, Subscribers or any other user of the Equedia Network Corporation Network of Sites, are those of the respective author(s) or distributor(s) and not of Equedia Network Corporation. Neither Equedia Network Corporation nor any third-party provider of information guarantees the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any content, nor its merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose.
Comments 1