I did not attend thinking to make a report so I may not have been as attentative to the details of the booth as you would like.  It was a relatively small booth.  The Zenyatta name was displayed prominently and there was a nice colour graphic of the deposit.  I didn't pay great attention to the details as I know the story and I went to talk to the people.  What I can say was that Aubrey Eveleigh, Sandra and Peter Wood were all in attendance.  I missed last year, but I attended PDAC in 2015 and 2016 as well and Aubrey and Peter were both at the booth then as well.

I don't want to misquote so I will try to keep this fairly general.  I started by asking about the dissent on the various forums.  Sandra indicated that there was a lot of misinformation circulating.  Aubrey indicated that it was the right of shareholders to call for a special meeting and that it was a distraction but not a huge distraction.   

I asked when they expected to be mining and selling product and both indicated 3 years, perhaps longer.  We discussed the graphene market and how it was presently unorganized with research projects going on all over the world.  The fact that as far as they could tell that most of the graphene used in research was being created using graphite from the mine in Sri Lanka or from samples provided by Zenyatta and that the impression they were getting was that the Zenyatta material was better.  The Sri Lankan deposit is also much smaller than ours.   

In terms of communication it was indicated that working with third parties made it challenge.  Third parties work on their own time tables and generally don't want to have there findings or even their identities publicised.  

I asked what market they thought would be the first to go commercial and was told that while batteries and similar applications held promise, composites incorporating composites would likely provide the volume and value to get things started.  In terms of value Aubrey made the comment "do you want to sell graphite at $7 per kilogram or graphene at $100,000 per kilogram." 

In terms of financing I was told that discussions were ongoing in this regard and I interpreted but was not told explicitly that a sucessful resolution was near.  

Aubrey also confirmed the fact that he had a significant investment in the company  (I estimate about 8% of outstanding shares) and that in addition his family and friends were heavily invested and assured me that he is working non-stop to get the value out of this deposit.  My impression is that he knows his stuff (as much as anyone can in a rapidly developing research driven precommercial market like graphene) and is driven to succeed.  

As a side note I bought more shares on Monday.

Pilgrim