March 2017 | Business View Magazine

58 59 money, it takes time, it takes energy, and it takes people; there’s no way around it. And as the costs continue to go up, the price of the metals continue to go up.” So, Tremblay is optimistic that the price of silver is going to rise over the next few years. (As of this writ- ing, a troy ounce of silver is hovering around the $18 mark.) “I think silver is going to take off,” he declares. “This time, it could push $100. I think there’s going to be a huge demand and I think that there are going to be a lot of companies looking for a project like ours. So, we’re not planning to operate the mine, ourselves; it’s too big.We’re not a large operating company, we’re an exploration company.What we do is find mines and then we sell them to companies – there Levon Resources, Ltd. Preferred vendor n Independent Mining Consultants, Inc. www.imctucson.com are many companies we can sell it to. So, it’s just a matter of the timing and the right internal rate of return on the project, which we see some- where between 28 and 38 percent.” While awaiting the expected rise in the price of silver, in order to keep his investors happy, Tremblay says that Levon Resources ended up diversifying, keeping about $25 million in cash and marketable securities within the company, and spending about $25 million to invest in VBI Vaccines, a biopharmaceutical firm, developing the next generation of vaccines to address un- met needs in infectious disease and immuno- oncology. “All of our shareholders received shares in VBI, plus the shares in Levon,” he reports. “So they got a dividend. I could see that the mining wasn’t going anywhere for a while, so I wanted to create some other opportunities for our share- holders and diversify a little bit until mining comes back.” When asked to look a few years ahead, Trem- blay responds that he expects that VBI Vaccines will be bought by one of the major pharmaceutical companies for $30 or $50 a share and that Levon will be bought out by a major mining company for close to a billion dollars, depending on the price of metals at the time.“Another mine close by was bought out for $400 million and it doesn’t have anything near what we’ve got,”he states.“We’ve got water, power; it’s a beautiful situation and we’ve got a nice labor force 35 kilometers away. Plus the state of Chihuahua and the government of Mexico are behind us 100 percent.” Now, it’s just a matter of watching and waiting.