Delamination is always a wet process, but usually the wet...

Delamination is always a wet process, but usually the wet process is applied to all the beneficiation steps, much it to decontaminate the ore using various chemicals and magnetic separation techniques. However, WAK intends to confine wet processing to the delamination step, so relative to competitors, WAK can probably produce top-priced delaminated kaolin at competitive cost. WAK's intended process is a K99 add-on using K99 product as feedstock. Being pedantic about words, I would not be so bold as to call that path unique, but it is certainly is unusual. WAK is less pedantic than I am, and WAK material refers to "Planned entry into the high premium paper market (via unique processing circuit R&D)". WAK does not say much about their delamination R&D.

Because I had done some research, I felt confident enough to discuss delaminated kaolin with Andrew Sorensen. and he concurred that the high-end paper-grade market of most interest is Japan. Paper is a sector that has an ethnic dimension, and quality paper is very important in Japanese culture. If the kaolin crystals are large and well ordered, as is the case with WAK's kaolin, the particles can be delaminated to be hyperplatey with a shape factor above 70. There is tedious information on this in a patent filing at patents.google.com/patent/US7208039B2/. My view is that WAK has been obsessed with delaminated kaolin since 1999, and I assume Management has good reasons for that interest. If one has kaolin that has the potential to make high-priced hyperplatey kaolin, grinding the crystals to make blocky K99F falls within the pale of vandalism.

The concept of cascading large-particle kaolin to finer-sized kaolin that I suggested in my earlier post remains valid for delaminated kaolin, except the apt size dimension switches from equivalent spherical diameter to the shape factor, which is often called the aspect ratio. Kaolin is to a high degree a bespoke business divided by customer specification, and the goal is to capture as much profit from the demand curve as possible by slicing the demand into individual specifications. If one did this for delaminated kaolin for Japan and China, the premium price payers would tend to be clustered in Japan.