Last year"s fundraising of $50 million has given Australian-based ferro-alloys company Precious Metals Australia Limited the ability to progress its $200 million redevelopment of its 90%-owned Windimurra Vanadium Mine in Western Australia .

The fundraising has given PMA in excess of $100 million in available cash resources, effectively underpinning the equity component of the total finance package for redevelopment of the Windimurra Mine.

The share placement, comprising 24,871,795 shares at an issue price of $1.95 per share to raise $48.5 million, was completed with Australian and international institutional institutions and clients of leading Australian broking firm, Patersons Securities Limited, which acted as Lead Manager to the share placement.

The placement was heavily oversubscribed, with strong support from both new and existing institutional shareholders in Australia and overseas.

PMA's managing director Roderick Smith says he was delighted with the exceptional investor response to the share placement, which reflected the robustness of the Winidmurra Project and its potential to become a profitable, long-life mining and processing operation delivering a premium quality product to world markets.

"Windimurra will account for around 8% of global vanadium production once it resumes full production by early 2008, with the significant enhancements to the project implemented over the past two years positioning it as a low-cost, competitive producer," Roderick Smith says.

"The project has already attracted the support of Noble Group, which has acquired equity in the project and the company, as well as signed up to a life-of-mine off-take agreement."

"I am pleased to welcome a number of substantial new institutional investors to our register and would like to take this opportunity to thank those who have supported this capital raising," he added.

"The completion of this raising has significantly strengthened our capital base and added significant liquidity to the share register," Roderick Smith says. "The company is now exceptionally well placed to move forward to complete financing and launch the redevelopment of this important project."

The raising comes just three months after Noble Group acquired a 10% holding in the Project for Aus$13.5 million, at the same time providing an unlisted, unsecured convertible note with a face value of Aus$8.2 million, convertible to 3.73 million fully-paid PMA shares at an equivalent issue price of Aus$2.20 per share.

The company expects to finalise the balance of the $200 million finance package by late January 2007, with project construction scheduled to start soon after, leading to first production by early 2008.

As part of an innovative strategy to lock in current prices and expedite the construction phase, PMA has already awarded four Front End Engineering and Design (FEED) contracts for the project and started purchasing mining fleet and state-of-the-art processing equipment.

Last week, PMA also announced the commencement of a significant new drilling program targeting zones of vanadium mineralisation parallel to the existing ore reserve. This will enable pit optimisations to be completed to develop a wider and deeper pit, without waste penalty, further reinforcing Windimurra's position as the world's largest reported proven vanadium ore reserve in the world.