Six staff have lost their jobs, but it was not all over for the project yet, company co-director and dredge project manager Peter Hall said.
About eight months after the troubled 24m suction dredge was launched, it was found to be "too inefficient" so it was "back to the drawing board", he said.
He declined to say how it was inefficient other than that they were not finding enough gold.
"Not even close. It wasn't paying its way." The project was launched in February on the Clutha River, about 500m below the Roxburgh Dam, and suffered a series of frustrating teething problems to do with its reliability, Mr Hall said.
Recently, it was decided to stop work and return to the drawing board in the hope of being able to redesign it.
To take the dredge off the river they needed consent from the Otago Regional Council, Land Information New Zealand and "just about everybody else", Mr Hall said.
Though it was still early days, if they got the necessary consents, it was intended the dredge would stay near the river while it was redesigned or rebuilt.
He did not know how long the whole process would take, but they did intend to resume operations, Mr Hall said.
The company has a 10-year consent to dredge a 60km stretch of the Clutha River from the Roxburgh Dam to Tuapeka Mouth.
Previously, when the price of gold was just over $NZ600 an ounce, the company's other director, Danny Walker, said they needed to find 3oz a day to make the project viable.
When the dredge was launched the gold price was just over $NZ2000 an ounce and he said he would like to recover 4oz a day over the 200 days a year the dredge would be operating.
Earlier this year, Roxburgh gold prospector Stu Edgecumbe said there was still "plenty of gold in the river" and the reason the miners of the late 1800s and early 1900s stopped working there was because they could not get deep enough.
