Thursday, April 21, 2011

Everything the company knew about the mine

Everything the company knew about the mine was shared with the geologists through the Internet. Substantial payments were offered for the best ideas. This occurred at a time when gold prices were at a near-term MBT Sport Shoes low in constant dollar terms.

As a result of having little else to do in the depressed market, many of the world's best geologists participated. Over 1400 prospectors registered for the challenge. A year later, the company announced that the winning submissions had located 6 million additional ounces of gold.

With further testing, that number may grow. The ultimate revenue from mining that gold will exceed one billion dollars and profits will probably be hundreds of millions of dollars. The cost of the prizes was $575,000. The prices cost less than the unproductive exploratory drilling that would otherwise have occurred.

To fully appreciate this experience, you should know that this is mine has operated for a lone time. Most would assume that there was little more gold to be found in it that has not already been identified.

To build on that success, the company launched its Global Search Challenge in March 2001. That contest looked for important mineral deposits worldwide over the following two years, and offered two million dollars in prizes.

This amounts to a second model change in only one year. This time, Goldcorp not only leveraged its own information, it also MBT Maliza,leveraged that of everyone else as well as their ability to interpret that information. Goldcorp will be able to access every geologist who learned something that a mining company is not yet exploiting.

And it can then simply use the best ideas. The mining industry should expect that the business model for finding minerals will continue to rapidly change.

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