Only one day after selling a nickel plant – complete with rooms for 200 workers and laboratories on-site – Poseidon Nickel’s (ASX:POS) CEO Craig Jones is “departing to pursue other opportunities.”
Mineral Resources didn’t just buy a “plant” off Poseidon on Monday. It bought Poseidon’s entire flagship project.
Brendan Shalders, current POS CFO, will step up to the CEO role from the start of next month.
Notably, the company says it will be “well-funded to execute its strategy when the proposed sale of Lake Johnston is finalised.”
What exactly Poseidon’s strategy could feasibly be after selling the Lake Johnston project remains to be seen. Right now POS has $2 million in cash “which sufficiently funds the business.”
Read: the business won’t be getting up to much.
Today Poseidon spoke of giving the market information “on executive management changes and further cost reduction initiatives.”
“With the divestment of Lake Johnston, Black Swan remaining on C&M, the shift back to exploration and the continued focus on cost reduction, Craig Jones who has a strong operational background has decided to seek other opportunities,” Poseidon Chair Peter Harold said.
Whether or not Lake Johnston was truly a ‘divestment’ is probably impossible to prove. But given the entire company is facing a world where Indonesia has pushed down global nickel prices and disrupted operations at BHP, IGO, and elsewhere, it feels a little bit more like MinRes picked up a decent asset for cheap off a distressed company.
Especially seeing as MinRes are going to turn it into a lithium plant, ahead of the next upwind in the price cycle for Australia’s favourite battery metal.
POS last traded at 0.8c. It was worth 13c in July of 2021.