syr holders - anti-canada & anti-china bias, page-4

Socrates, could I respectfully point out that your statements range from plain wrong, to misleading, to irrelevant.

Let me show why.

1. You claim that "SYR will not have a JORC until 2013".
Sorry, wrong. The Chairman's Letter, with the Annual Rpeort, states:
"Syrah anticipates announcing JORC compliant resources for both Balama West and Balama East before the end of December 2012."

2. "Focus Graphite is well down the road to vertical integration". OK, but why not also mention that Focus Graphite has a small orebody containing about 2% graphite. It's a reasonable guess that they want to get into the graphene business because they stand little chance of making money in the graphite mining business. SYR, at this stage, at least, is in the graphite mining business, not graphene manufacture. So graphene production is simply not relevant. It is difficult to see how you can consider Focus as a competitor.

3. "Northern Graphite has completed first phase testing of Spherical Graphite". But you forgot to mention that Northern Graphite's Bissett Creek mine has been in the feasibility study stage for months, has an ore grade ranging from 2.3% to 2.5%, and an average strip ratio of 0.66 to 1. That's a lot of overburden to remove for not much graphite. Are they in the graphite mining business, or the spherical graphite business? If it's spherical graphite, then they can buy high-quality flake graphite from anywhere, and SYR stand out as a potential low-cost supplier.
Again, do you see Northern Graphiter as a serious competitor to Balama in the graphite mining business?

4. "China has just announced breakthroughs ... in graphene production". So what? Again, completely irrelevant to graphite production at Balama. The graphene producers, whoever and wherever they set up business, will buy their raw material, namely graphite, from anybody they choose (and, by the way, their consumption of graphite will be very small, compared to the current world usage)

5. "Kearney mine in Ontario ... has the largest resource in North America". True, but that does not make it remotely comparable to Balama, either in grade (Kearney is just above 2%) or in reserves (total reserves at Kearney are about 1.3 million tonnes of graphite). There are no graphite reserves known in North America anything like Balama. The Kearney web site, where your quote comes from, tries to present the best picture, but the orebody is very small beer compared to that of SYR at Balama.

I completely agree that it is better to know your competition. To do that we must do two things:

First, we need to state what business we are in, so that we can say which companies are in the same business, and therefore represent competition.

Second, we need to specify the resources that these competitors have available to them, so that we can assess whether they are likely to be in a position to offer a competitive product, at a competitive price, in the volume required by the market.

Based on these criteria, I simply do not see that any of these Canadian companies are likely to be serious competitors to SYR, in the graphite mining business.

Where am I wrong?

Cheers, Prime