Nothing happens by halves in David Flanagan's world. After a long period of suspension on the ASX, Arrow Minerals is back in business with two projects in WA and two in Guinea. The company has a market cap of just sixteen million dollars.

Guest Bio

David Flanagan is Managing Director of Arrow Minerals (ASX: AMD), which returned to trading in 2026 after Arrow secured clarity over its tenement ownership in Guinea. The company now holds four projects: the Yarraloola Copper Project and a new iron ore project in the Pilbara, Western Australia, alongside the Niagara Bauxite Project and the Simandou North Iron Project in Guinea.

A geologist by training, Flanagan founded Atlas Iron in 2004 and led it as managing director and later chair until 2016, building it into an ASX 50 iron ore producer before it was acquired by Hancock Prospecting in 2018. He was previously exploration manager at Gindalbie Gold, served as chancellor of Murdoch University from 2013 to 2019, and was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2018 for services to mining, community and education.

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Key Insights

A 424-day suspension is finally behind the company Arrow's shares were suspended for roughly a year after Guinea's mines department placed around 400 exploration tenements, including Arrow's Niagara Bauxite and Simandou North projects, into an ownership review. Flanagan says Arrow made its case and was told a decision would come "in a very short time" — which turned out to mean 424 days. Niagara has now been formally returned to Arrow, with the government working through the remaining tenements, including Simandou North, one by one.

A copper-gold bet built on a 1970s "flag" and modern geophysics The Yarraloola Copper Project was attractive to Flanagan for two reasons: Newexco Exploration's Adrian Black and Bill Amann, veterans of discoveries including Nova-Bollinger, identified surface gold tied to a structure on the ground; and historical drilling by Western Mining in the 1970s intersected copper-silver-zinc mineralisation consistent with a VMS system without ever being assayed for gold. Arrow has also struck a deal with Leeuwin Metals (ASX: LM1) over the adjoining, base-metal-prospective tenement. Heritage survey work with the native title group is underway ahead of planned drilling later this year.

A Pilbara iron ore punt right next to a $75 million benchmark Arrow's new Barbecue Valley project sits roughly 15 kilometres from Rio Tinto's Robe River joint venture iron ore operations near Onslow, and channel iron deposit (CID) mineralisation is visible outcropping on the tenement itself. Flanagan points to the Robe River joint venture's 2025 acquisition of CZR Resources' adjoining Robe Mesa project for A$75 million as a read on what comparable ground nearby could be worth, and says the plan is to secure heritage clearance and drill as quickly as possible to test for a direct-shipping-ore style deposit.

Niagara bauxite is banking on the Simandou rail line The core reason Arrow went to Guinea, Flanagan says, was the newly built Simandou multi-user railway, which has capacity well beyond what the Simandou mines it primarily serves will use. Arrow has an MOU with Baosteel, the resources arm of China's Baowu Steel Group and a key financier of the broader Simandou project, over access and offtake. Arrow finished a scoping study on Niagara just as the suspension hit and never published it; Flanagan plans further supplier and cost meetings in Guinea in September to refresh the numbers before releasing an updated study.

A four-project portfolio stacked under a $16 million market cap Flanagan describes Arrow's approach as layering multiple value-creating opportunities — Yarraloola, Barbecue Valley, Niagara and Simandou North — on top of each other rather than trying to fund and develop every asset alone, with a preference for bringing in partners once projects are proven up. With renewed investor interest already flowing in since the suspension lifted, Flanagan argues the leverage across four assets, both in Western Australia and Guinea, is significant relative to the company's current $16 million market capitalisation.