david morgan speculates that the company may be a takeover target:

At the Snowfield Project, SSRI completed a preliminary assessment (“PA”) study. As was indicated in the initial report on the company, the Snowfield Project accounts for much of the company’s market cap. The PA estimated a pre-tax net present value of US$877 million (5% discount rate) for the project, as well as 23-year mine life at 607,000 oz Au in annual production. As we said at the time, this is a monster of a project that will have lots of credits from copper, silver, and moly, and will get bigger when combined with the adjacent Brucejack Project owned by Silver Standard. Of note is the estimated capex of US$3.4 Billion for mine construction. To reiterate, assuming there are no insurmountable metallurgical differences between Snowfield and the KSM Project of Seabridge Gold (TSX: SEA), we believe this whole area including the Brucejack Project should be consolidated in the same hands and likely will be. Combined, they can support a mine producing on the order of two to three million ounces of gold (equivalent) per year. Capex for such a mine would be north of $5 Billion, perhaps significantly so. And that makes it a BHP-size proposition. Hmm . . . didn’t Silver Standard just hire an ex-BHP executive??

BHP or not, there are potentially a dozen companies in the world that would take on a project of this scale and there aren’t many of them (monster projects) out there. Vale, Rio Tinto, and Barrick come to mind, but the list is short and these bigger companies tend to focus on industrial metals. Perhaps it will be a Chinese, Indian, Japanese, or Korean conglomerate or a JV of sort. In any case, we don’t think Silver Standard will be advancing the project much beyond the current study on the combined Snowfield/Brucejack economics, but the value is certainly there. Thus we reiterate our outlook that Silver Standard is a potential takeover target for a major (s) in whole or in part.