Newcore Gold Pushes 80,000-Meter Drill Program at Enchi as Latest Hole Spurs 30% Stock Move

## The Setup: A Two-Pronged Program

Newcore Gold is running development work and exploration drilling at the same time at its Enchi gold project in Ghana. According to Greg Smith, the company's VP of Exploration, Newcore has already worked through a preliminary economic assessment (PEA — a high-level study that scopes whether a project can plausibly be a mine) and a pre-feasibility study on Enchi, but he framed those documents as "snapshots in time." The current 80,000-meter drill program is meant to refresh the resource base ahead of a new mine plan and a fresh feasibility study targeted for completion before the end of 2027.

The headline resource today, as Smith describes it, is 1.5 million ounces in the indicated category and more than 600,000 ounces in the inferred category — roughly 2.1 million ounces in total. He pointed out that a chunk of the inferred material sits inside the pits already drawn in the pre-feasibility study, but does not get pulled into the mine plan because pre-feasibility studies can only count indicated ounces. Closing that gap is one of the explicit jobs of the current drill program.

## The Drill Program in Numbers

Smith walked Jeff Clark through the program arithmetic:

- Total program size: 80,000 meters. - Released to date: 47,000 meters, including the most recent batch of results. - Remaining to drill: about 16,000 meters. - In the assay queue: 17,000 meters of core drilled but not yet reported. - Timeframe: drilling and assaying both wrap by year-end.

Smith said Newcore is "fully funded" for the program out of about $15 million of cash on the balance sheet at the start of the quarter, with multiple drill rigs running. He described the cash burn as being used "wisely" given that several drills are turning at once.

The just-released batch, Smith said, included what he described as "one of the best holes we ever drilled" at the Boin deposit. He pointed to the share price, which he said moved roughly 30% on that result, as evidence that investors still pay attention to high-grade drill hits even when the company already controls a multi-million-ounce resource.

## Three Flavors of Drilling

Smith broke the program into three working modes:

1. **Infill drilling inside known deposits** — designed to convert inferred ounces into indicated ounces so they can flow into the next mine plan. 2. **Step-out drilling** — testing areas outside the existing reserves and resource envelope. 3. **New-target drilling** — testing prospects along strike from the known deposits where earlier first-pass drilling and trenching have not yet been followed up.

He also pointed to a longer-dated, but for now back-burnered, source of upside: depth. Newcore's average pit depth at Enchi is around 150 meters from surface, according to Smith. The closest regional analogue he cited is a mine roughly 40 kilometers from Enchi that started as a cluster of shallow open pits and is now mining underground at roughly 800 meters below surface, with reserves and resources extending several hundred meters beyond that. Smith said Newcore will continue to drill "deeper at reasonable levels" rather than chase the deepest ounces right away, leaving the deep target as a longer-dated growth lever.

## Catalysts Over the Next 6–12 Months

Smith's short list of near-term catalysts maps closely to the drill program:

- A steady drumbeat of assay results from the remaining 16,000 meters of drilling and the 17,000 meters currently in the lab. - Updated mineral resource estimates that incorporate the new drilling. - A new mine plan built on those updated resources. - Background technical work — metallurgical (testing ore recovery), geotechnical (slope stability and rock mechanics), and hydrogeological (water management) testing — feeding into the next feasibility study, which he expects to wrap before the end of 2027.

He was explicit that the drilling itself is "probably the main catalyst" over the next 6 to 12 months, with the resource update and mine plan following once the rigs stop turning.

## Capital Structure and Ownership

Smith shared a few shareholder-mix data points worth flagging:

- Management and board ownership: about 12%, with Smith emphasizing that the stake was built with cash alongside investors rather than free grants. - Institutional ownership: roughly 55%. - Sell-side coverage: three analysts currently covering the stock.

## Why Ghana Matters to the Story

Smith used the final minute of the interview to make the jurisdictional case for Ghana, which he argued is often overlooked. He noted that Ghana is Africa's largest gold-producing country and the sixth largest globally, and that major operators — Newmont, Goldfields, and AngloGold Ashanti — all run significant mines there. He pointed to a roughly $1 billion brownfield (expansion at an existing operation) investment by Newmont that is moving into production as a sign that the country continues to attract major capital for new and expanding mines, including open pits that are transitioning to underground operations.

## Putting It Together

For an investor watching Newcore Gold, the message from this conversation is simple: the next year is essentially a drill-results story, with the resource update and feasibility study arriving on the back end. The cash position covers the program, the rigs are turning, and the assay queue is already deep enough to keep newsflow steady through year-end. The bigger conceptual upside — moving from today's 2.1 million ounces toward the 5–6 million ounce range Smith said other deposits on the same belt have reached — depends on the deeper drilling and the new targets along strike, which Smith framed as a multi-year effort rather than a 2026 event.