The Yubdo Mine is 520 km almost due west from Addis Ababa. The road is tarred to Gimbi (460 km from Addis) and the remainder of the road is gravel. Yubdo village and the mine site have recently been connected to the grid and a digital telephone centre is under construction in the village.

Through its subsidiary Golden Prospect Mining Company (“GPMC”) Nyota owns 51% of Yubdo Gold and Platinum Development Plc (“Yubdo Platinum”).

Yubdo has has been a producing mine for some time but on a small scale and the quantity of platinum recovered is modest. Historically, approximately 2,700 kilograms of platinum have been produced at Yubdo by hydraulic mining, mostly during the period 1926-1941 but with small-scale production continuing to the present day.

The complex metallurgy associated with the platinum bearing laterites and the resulting low recoveries has convinced Nyota of the merits of shutting down the existing small-scale pilot plant and focussing on exploration to locate any hard rock source for the mineralisation.

Historic metallurgical test work suggests that the platinum is ferrous, fine grained and associated with clays within the saprolite – laterite. The ease of mining and potential for further platinum bearing laterite resources within the licence area provides Nyota with the motivation to undertake further metallurgical test work whilst the pilot plant programme is suspended. This testwork is to find alternative processing methodologies to improve platinum recovery.