It is a long way from cape Breton Island to the American Stock Exchange. Such a thought ran through Terry MacGibbon’s mind as he stood ringing the Amex’s opening bell to celebrate his company’s listing on the exchange in 2003.

The president of emerging nickel producer FNX Mining Co., and this year’s recipient of the Prospector’s and Developers Association of Canada’s Developers Award, grew up in New Waterford, N.S., a mining community north of Sydney. But the geology bug didn’t bite him until he entered university in the mid-1960s.

By age 21, he had graduated from St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S., a few years ahead of former premier Frank McKenna, an FNX director (although probably not for much longer, given his new responsibilities as Canada’s ambassador to the U.S.).

MacGibbon’s first job at one of Inco Ltd.’s nickel mines in Sudbury, Ont., was a humble but appropriate precursor to his current position at the helm of a base metal company with a market capitalization of $250 million.

After a short stint underground, MacGibbon joined Inco’s exploration team, gradually working his way up the ranks to become director of international exploration. He may well have become a company lifer it weren’t for Inco’s policy of offering full pensions after 30 years of employment.

In 1997, too young and energetic at age 51 to retire, he entered the high-stakes world of junior mining. It wasn’t an auspicious time to take the leap. The Bre-X Minerals Ltd.
scandal had decimated the sector, metal prices were low and any available risk capital was being scooped up by the high-tech industry. But MacGibbon had an idea he thought would suit a bear market.

“My strategy was to acquire non-core assets from major companies,” he says. “I felt that was the way we would build the company rather than through drilling prospects, which is a difficult way to build.”

His first step was to assume the presidency of Fort Knox Gold Resources Inc., a penny junior in which Inco had invested in the 1980s during MacGibbon’s tenure as exploration director. To preserve the junior’s limited capital, he operated Fort Knox out of his basement.

Market conditions made it impossible for him to acquire the projects he needed until 2001, when Inco decided to divest some of its non-core assets in the Sudbury basin, properties that no longer met the economic criteria required by a giant worldwide producer. That year, nickel bottomed at about US$2 a pound. (It now trades at more than US$6.)

Inco put five properties that had produced copper, nickel, platinum, palladium and gold on the block to secure feed for its smelters from the mine remnants without having to invest its own capital and personnel.

MacGibbon knew this was the chance he’d been seeking. He felt comfortable heading up the exploration side of the bid, but was less confident about the mining angle.

So he and lead director, Robert Cudney, approached Dynatec Corp., an international mining contractor with experience in the Sudbury basin. Dynatec agreed to take responsibility for mining in exchange for a share of the proceeds, and the Sudbury Joint Venture (75% Fort Knox; 25% Dynatec)
was born.

The pairing of an exploration firm with a publicly traded mining contractor is unique.
But the partnership has worked, allowing Fort Knox to grow from a penny junior to a nickel producer in less than two years, a short time in an industry in which projects can take a decade or more to reach production.

The next step was to secure financing, a seemingly impossible task for a junior miner at that time. But Fort Knox had another believer in Dundee Precious Metals Inc.,
which agreed to raise more than $1 million in seed capital to finance the bid and subsequent negotiations. With plans and seed capital in place, Fort Knox won the bid handily.

The deal, the result of 10 months of negotiations with Inco, gave the junior the right to 100% of the five former producers in return for guaranteeing Inco an equity stake in Fort Knox, seats on its board, $30 million in exploration expenditures by May 2006, back-in rights should Fort Knox find a deposit big enough to interest Inco, and the right to process and market ore production.

Fast-forward three years. FNX (the firm changed its name in 2002), with a market capitalization of $250 million, has raised more than $125 million in equity, achieved production of 1,000 tonnes a day, established several million tonnes of reserves and resources, and made three new discoveries. Feasibility studies are underway on projects scheduled to enter production at a rate of a mine a year for the next three years. Aggressive exploration continues. Nickel and copper, FNX’s two
main commodities, are in a bull cycle.