Excellent progress was made during the period in lifting revenue for Internet products.

MiningNews.net has shown a 60 per cent increase in site traffic since June. Plans are in place for increasing revenue from Australia's Mining Monthly and an additional Longwalls magazine was published.

A new joint venture was signed and a new Internet site is being developed.

Overview

The September quarter has been an excellent period for Aspermont with real progress being made in lifting revenue for Internet published products. MiningNews.net showed an increase in site traffic of 60% since June and this increase is expected to convert to subscription revenue over the next few months.

In print, plans are now in place for lifting revenue from Australia's Mining Monthly and an additional Longwalls magazine was published.

Plans are advanced for the next Internet site and a joint venture was finalised with conferencing group, the Institute for International Research ("IIR").

Print

Print has performed well with the highlight for the quarter being the addition of a third Australia's Longwalls magazine for the year. It may be worth noting that the term "longwall" refers to a mining method used in underground coal mines.

The third magazine has been introduced at the request of subscribers and will focus on global longwall mines. This is a cost effective magazine as no additional staff or resources are needed for its production.

The current quarter is a busy time of year as the print division is heavily involved in the forward selling of next year's advertising and developing new feature lists. Advertising rate increases are also planned for 2003 to bring Aspermont's rates into line with industry standards.

Aspermont was pleased to work closely with the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies (AMEC) and the Civil Contractors Federation (CCF) of Western Australia to produce yearbooks for these associations. The Company was also responsible during the period for production of the Goldfields Mining Expo program.

MiningNews.net - Site Use

Use of the MiningNews.net site, by all measures, has grown at a tremendous rate since June. Four usage indicators are tracked for MiningNews.net: sessions, page impressions, stories viewed and total hits and all have shown the same strong increase.

Sessions indicate the number of individual Internet users visiting the site. Page impressions indicates the number of pages viewed by all users during a 24 hour period.

Stories viewed indicates the number of stories viewed and does not include the home page or section indices. Total hits includes all files accessed by all users.

By way of example, the accompanying chart shows the growth in hits since the inception of MiningNews.net in August 2000. The actual number of hits is not shown for reasons of commercial confidentiality. Usage has increased by 60% since June as a result of new marketing initiatives.

This growth in site traffic is attributable to a series of marketing initiatives over the past few months. The format of the daily newsletter emailed to subscribers was enhanced and a series of mail campaigns returned a very high positive response rate of 21.4%.