Rome Resources

Drilling Done. Now We Wait.

Good Afternoon Team.

Rome Resources has wrapped up its current drilling campaign at Kalayi, and if the early numbers are anything to go by, the geological gods may finally be smiling on this particular corner of the DRC.

Seventeen holes.

3,050 metres of core.

The campaign has been running since December 2025, and Kalayi took the lion’s share — 91% of total metres drilled — which tells you exactly where the company’s excitement is focused right now.

So what have they actually found?

The short answer is: a lot of tin, and quite possibly more than anyone expected.

The longer answer involves portable XRF readings (the handheld devices that give indicative grade results in the field before formal lab assays come back).

These aren’t bankable numbers, but they’re not nothing either, and Rome has been careful to flag that caveat at every turn.

What they show is a clear progression in both the grade and width of mineralisation compared to every previous campaign the company has run at Kalayi.

The top five intercepts from this campaign exceed the maximum richness recorded across all previous campaigns combined. The widest intercepts are the widest the project has ever seen.

The strongest grades are the strongest the project has ever seen.

For context, some of the headline XRF hits from the programme include 4 metres at 7.75% tin, an 11-metre composite at 3.43% tin, and a 1-metre hit at 6.6% tin (sitting inside a broader interval).

Alphamin’s Mpama North main vein — the highest-grade tin deposit on the planet, 8 kilometres down the road — averages 4.35% tin across 2-22 metre widths.

Rome is now drilling intercepts that belong in the same conversation.

One hole in particular is worth flagging:

KBDD029 returned 10 metres at 1.3% tin from 220 metres depth. That might not sound like the headline grabber, but it sits at or below the base of the maiden resource envelope — meaning mineralisation is continuing to open at depth, exactly as the geological model predicted, and exactly as the Alphamin system behaves when you drill deeper into it.

What happens next?

Formal laboratory assays — the numbers that actually count — are pending from ALS in Johannesburg. When those land, they feed into an updated Mineral Resource Estimate, which the company is targeting for the coming weeks.

The maiden MRE defined 4.47kt of contained tin. The geological team’s internal estimates suggest this campaign alone could deliver something considerably more significant than that.

CEO Paul Barrett put it diplomatically:

‘These early indicators provide a compelling case for Kalayi’s economic potential and suggest a clear step forward compared to previous drilling campaigns.’

Translation: we think this is good, and we’re looking forward to the lab confirming it.

The bigger picture

Rome sits at a £20 million market cap, 8 kilometres from a mine valued at CAD$1.5 billion. That gap does not close to zero — a producing mine deserves to trade at a very substantial premium to an explorer — but the geological evidence that Bisie North is on the same mineralised system as Alphamin is becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss with each passing drill hole.

Tin’s supply-demand fundamentals remain as compelling as ever. The US-DRC strategic partnership continues to improve the investment backdrop for the region.

And management has confirmed it is in ongoing discussions with potential strategic partners regarding development pathways — which, given that Alphamin’s processing plant sits 8km away, makes the identity of the most obvious conversation partner fairly easy to guess.

The June MRE is the moment of truth.

If the lab assays confirm what the XRF readings are suggesting, this could be a serious re-rating event for a company that has been quietly building one of the more interesting tin stories in the junior mining space.

For now, the drills are down and the samples are in Johannesburg.

The waiting game begins.

Watch this space.