Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Odyssey Marine Recovers Portion of Siver Treasure, Stock Drops (OMEX)

OMEX is trading at $3.85, down 9.44% while silver futures settled at $27.15 an ounce.

In September 2011 we linked to "Odyssey Marine Exploration Looks to Recover 240 Tons of Silver in Largest-ever Marine Salvage Find (OMEX)":
... Gold and silver prices, hit hard last week, remain near historic highs. On Friday, gold suffered its biggest one-day loss in five years, dropping 5.8 percent to $1,637.50 an ounce. Silver fell 15 percent, posting its biggest one-day decline since 1987. It traded today around $31. These reduced values are still far above the levels needed to make salvage profitable.

"My guess is, we're not going to see much more degradation of precious metals prices, going forward," says Odyssey president Mark Gordon. He expects gold and silver prices to remain high, buoyed by investors' worries about the world economy....
Forecasting is hard.
Here's the latest, from Bloomberg:
WWII Shipwreck Yields $38 Million of Silver From Atlantic
Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. (OMEX), a deep-ocean exploration company, said it recovered about 48 tons of silver from a World War II shipwreck three miles (4.8 kilometers) beneath the Atlantic Ocean.

The company retrieved 1,203 silver bars, or about 1.4 million ounces of the metal, from the SS Gairsoppa, a 412-foot (126-meter) British cargo ship that sank after being torpedoed by German U-boat in February 1941, Tampa, Florida-based Odyssey said today in a statement. The metal, worth $38 million at today’s prices, is being held at a secure facility in the U.K.

Odyssey said the recovered silver represents about 20 percent of the bullion that may be on board the Gairsoppa, which lies about 300 miles off the coast of Ireland. The operation, the largest and deepest recovery of precious metals from a shipwreck, should be completed in the third quarter, Tampa, Florida-based Odyssey said.
“With the shipwreck lying approximately three miles below the surface of the North Atlantic, this was a complex operation,” Greg Stemm, Odyssey chief executive officer, said in the statement. “Our success on the Gairsoppa marks the beginning of a new paradigm for Odyssey in which we expect modern shipwreck projects will complement our archaeological shipwreck excavations."...MORE
The company also reported financial results for Q2 ended June 30.
Small and ugly.

Here's the other project Odyssey is currently working on:
Odyssey Marine and the Lost Spanish Treasure (OMEX)