Email 'President's Message' item to a friend
Show printable version of 'President's Message' item in a New Window

President's Message

Dear Shareholder,

Our vision to use the well-established copper porphyry mining model as a template to develop our "naturally occurring stainless steel" nickel-iron alloy targets has progressed significantly in the last year. Our flagship Decar project has provided the starting point to validate this concept as it shows promising potential to be a bulk-tonnage, open pit, nickel-iron alloy deposit of potentially economic grade, with a very low strip ratio. The nickel-iron alloy is highly magnetic, dense and contains no sulphides so it has the potential to be amenable to simple, low-risk magnetic and gravity separation recovery into a nickel-iron concentrate. We expect that the concentrate can be sold directly to the ferro-nickel industry without the need for smelting and its inherent costs. The absence of sulphides will also result in a much lower environmental impact and associated mitigation costs at the minesite, as there will be no acid rock drainage issues.

Cliffs Natural Resources, a Fortune 500 company and steel industry leader, has joined us in advancing Decar. Cliffs is a very natural fit for Decar as its expertise is in processing bulk-tonnage open pit iron ore deposits using magnetic and gravity separation techniques to upgrade the iron. Cliffs is also a 15% shareholder in your company, having made its initial investment through a private placement in late 2009, subscribed to its pro-rata share of a second private placement in April 2010 and recently exercised the 1,125,000 warrants it acquired in the April 2010 financing a full year in advance of the April 26, 2012 date the warrants would otherwise expire. By agreement with the Company, Cliffs cannot increase its pro-rata shareholding in the Company prior to December 2013.

The Company has seen success build upon success over this past year, and really launched into a new phase with Cliffs' recognition of the potential of our Decar nickel-iron alloy property. Cliffs option on Decar and investment in the Company late in 2009 resulted in market recognition of the credibility and potential of First Point's vision.

Milestones achieved since then have included:
  • Raising $7.5 million in the spring of 2010, which was heavily oversubscribed (Cliffs subscribed to its pro-rata share) to finance worldwide exploration for additional nickel-iron alloy properties, similar to Decar.
  • Drilling of nine widely-spaced holes at Decar during the summer of 2010, including seven holes into the Baptiste target and two holes into the Sidney target. This drilling confirmed that the disseminated nickel-iron alloy mineralization discovered at surface is consistent in grade and grain size to depths exceeding 300 metres. All nine holes bottomed in mineralization.
  • Drilling also expanded the lateral extent of the Baptiste and Sidney targets, showing that the nickel alloy mineralization continues under overburden, between the surface outcrops identified during earlier exploration programs. The mineralized drill holes at Baptiste were up to 1.7 kilometres apart, demonstrating the extent of the mineralization.
  • Development of a commercially certified, selective extraction process for analyzing nickel-iron alloy, which is proprietary to First Point.
  • Initiated metallurgical testing on the drill core. In March 2011, Cliffs concluded the initial results were "positive' and committed to a minimum of a further 4,000 metres of drilling. The full results of this metallurgical test work are expected by early this summer.

This work has fully supported the geological model we have for the nickel-iron alloy mineralization and has increased our confidence in ongoing exploration at Decar and in the search for more of these occurrences around the world. Employing proprietary exploration expertise, we are actively searching for other properties like Decar, all 100%-owned, and we are well cashed up to execute this work.

Your continuing support and enthusiasm are much appreciated.


Dr. Peter Bradshaw, P.Eng.

President & CEO