Michael Samis

Background

About Michael Samis

Mike is a mining engineer with more than 25 years of natural resource industry experience involving operations, commodity price modelling, project valuation, finance, and corporate portfolios. He focuses on the following Strategic Capital Management (SCM) decisions and opportunities: Investing capital and making strategic investment design choices such as explaining the value and risk trade-offs between upfront and staged investment project designs, Analysing project and corporate financing alternatives such as measuring the risk impact of streaming and sliding scale royalty finance, Protecting and building a company’s balance sheet such as assessing the possibility of covenant breaches and credit downgrades when financing an acquisition, and Reviewing corporate portfolio alternatives such as assessing the impact of country risk on a global portfolio of mining investments. His SCM work uses an Integrated Valuation and Risk Modelling (IVRM) framework which is a combination of finance theory, decision analytics, risk management concepts, and numerical methods. IVRM expands the description of a SCM decision by recognizing forecast uncertainty and the ability to manage it through investment/operational flexibility and the contingent structuring of finance and taxation. As a result, IVRM has an enhanced ability to evaluate and communicate the risk exposure of competing SCM choices. Mike’s mining and petroleum assignments involve complex forms of flexibility, financing, and risk exposure and range from the exploration stage through to late-stage capital investments. He has presented more than 30 IVRM courses world-wide to universities, public companies, and government. Mike is a registered Professional Engineer, a qualified person for valuation under NI 43-101 guidelines, and the recipient of the 2013 Robert Elver Mineral Economics Award from CIM for contributions to the Canadian mining industry in the field of mineral economics.