PDAC 2016: Fission CEO says utilities need to buy uranium sometime soon, dismisses proxy fight as distraction

The uranium market has been around a five-year bear market that shows no signs of recovery, in part because utilities are betting prices will stay low and therefore are in no hurry to secure future supply.

Dev Randhawa, chief executive of Fission Uranium Corp., said they need to start buying in big amounts within the next three years to have their reactors going. But he has no idea precisely when that purchasing will happen.

“Until utilities buy, the location price is not going to move,” he said in an interview.

Fission, one of Canada’s few junior mining success stories of latest years, can withstand this bear market as it raised $82 million from state-owned Chinese firm CGN Mining Company Ltd. in January. The business’s Patterson Lake South (PLS) discovery in Saskatchewan’s Athabasca Basin is among the world’s best uranium finds in decades.

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But it was a turbulent ride for that company this past year. Shareholders voted down its planned merger with Denison Mines Corp., along with a retail shareholder later attempted to replace Fission’s directors inside a proxy fight.

Randhawa asserted effort was nonsense from day one and never had a chance of success. He noted that certain of those behind the proxy fight, Ben Ainsworth, was CEO of the company called Alpha Minerals Inc. that Fission acquired a couple of years ago. Fission and Alpha used to be co-owners from the PLS discovery, but Randhawa said that Alpha shareholders found him requesting a takeover, and Ainsworth is still bitter about this.

He noted that Fission’s directors got re-elected by a larger number of shareholder votes at last December’s annual meeting compared to what they did the prior year, when there had not been effort to unseat them.

“I call it the phantom fight,” he explained. “All it did was ended up costing $300,000.”