Todd Axford’s Views on Fuse Minerals

In an exclusive interview with Todd Axford, the visionary mind behind Fuse Minerals, we delve into the compelling story of innovation, sustainability, and the relentless pursuit of excellence that defines the brand.

Who is FUSE Minerals and what do you do?

Fuse Minerals is a mineral exploration company focused at the moment on copper and other associated base metals. We’ve got our IPO offer open at the moment. We’re looking to close that on 24th of January. If we satisfy the requirements for ASX before we’ll close early so we’re really set up to get out there and get drilling in February. We’ve got a strategy that we believe sets us apart from a lot of explorers and it’s focused on early partnership with some of the bigger established miners which allow us to take our discoveries through to profit-generating mines and limit dilution but offer investors short, medium and longer-term return potential.

Tell us about your core projects

So Mount Sydney, 1119 square kilometres of tenure. We’ve got six drill-ready targets there. We’ve had some pretty spectacular surface sample results at the bull target up to 20% copper, 20% lead, 700 ppm silver. We’re excited to drill that. We’ve got a VMS target there with 640 meters of the strike of gossans at the surface and then a magnetic sulfide target that’s yet to be drill tested along with three other targets there.

Mount Sandiman in the Gascoyn region. There’s drill-ready Mississippi Valley-type targets. Got almost 300 square kilometers of tenure there. Untested potential for uranium. Lithium, rare earths that are common in that region.

And then over in Queensland, in central Queensland, Eastern Isaac project, we’ve got some volcanic arc rocks, Connor’s arc, classic porphyry epithermal targets and then in the Bowen base and sediments we’ve got the potential for these replacements, Stahl and Brassia deposits, a copper, silver, gold targets that we think could be some big scale deposits.

What differentiates you from other mineral explorers?

I think it’s our strategy which is to partner with established miners early in the process. By doing that we attract funding that is non -dilutionary to shareholders. We don’t have to go back with continual raises. It gives us an opportunity for short, medium, and longer-term growth with those established partners being able to take any discoveries through to mining. Something that a lot of junior explorers struggle to do.

Another key part of that strategy is actually setting up projects that are capable of delivering discoveries that the bigger companies are interested in. They’re not interested in a 40 ,000 ounce gold resource. If it’s gold, they want a million-ounce gold resource potential. For us, we’re looking at working in those project areas that have the mineral system fundamentals to support the big discoveries without there being a huge amount of past work.

Therefore the blue sky potential is there for those mining companies when they come and look at partnering with us. We’ve also put a team together, led by myself technically and Warren Mundine as the chairman, that we believe has got the capabilities to sit down at the table with those companies and get deals done, which will drive growth of the company in the short, medium and longer term.

What is the experience of the board and management team?

Started my life as a geologist in the mid-90s, ended up in WA working gold, iron ore sort of mining industry, and then transitioned across to exploration, set up a geological services company in 2010. Through that, I’ve worked for a lot of junior companies doing specific little projects or providing technical management to those companies and that’s sort of fed in that experience to what we’re trying to do with Fuse and be different and look at generating those medium longer-term returns.

And then leading the board is Warren Mundine, he’s a fairly well-known person generally, probably not a lot of people know that he started his life essentially working for the oil and gas sector, doing pipeline access agreements and things like that. He’s now on the board of Aura Energy, he’s quite passionate about explorers being able to get out into regional Australia and drive a bit of economic activity and development, but he also brings that capability to knock on the sort of higher doors in some of the bigger players in the industry to allow us to implement our strategy of partnering with those guys.

We’ve also got Vern Tidy who was the ex-chair of the Venco who went over to Brazil a number of years back. They eventually were taken out by US Minerals for over $400 million. Vern was also a partner in EY and Perth looking after the mining side of the business. So he brings good governance and experience there. I’ve got Steve Pearson as a non-executive director, and experienced exploration geologist.

And then we’ve also got an experienced sort of corporate team in the company secretary and CFO.

How will the IPO funds be used?

So we’ll be working on all of our three projects next year with those funds. Priority is Mount Sydney. We’ll be drilling in February and we’ve got six drill-ready targets there. And then we’ll be moving to Mount Sandiman where we’ll complete a heritage survey and drill some of the targets there. And then we should be over in Eastern Isaac drilling later in the year. Combined with that we’ll have some regional exploration work looking to bring in those additional new targets that flow through into 2025 and looking at generating some new projects.

What excites you most about the Fuse Minerals opportunity?

Yeah, so what excites me most is the fact that as we’ve been getting around telling the story we’ve attracted interest from other geologists, and experienced players in the industry who are coming up to us saying, love your projects and potentially love the strategy, want to invest in them, putting their hands in their pockets and taking up shares in the company.

So that’s really validating our approach and exciting us and giving us that real drive to get listed and get out on the ground exploring.