Serious Debate Anyone, page-38

Hiya Paul. Firstly - has to be said but brother you have the patience of a saint. And the MEGA research you do - hope to see you out about on other threads for diff stocks and diff businesses. You belong out on the threads.

Totally agree with your point. I'd expect all pits both super and boutique to run into issues. But if similarities of deposits exist than I would expect there to be less issues. Possibly far less.

And these issues - they would be twofold. One set of issues centres on how it would be mined and treated to optimise recoveries. The other set centres around producing something that can be substituted for types of graphites currently preferred by end users. You can see why i see the similarities as pivotal to reducing risk. Whether these two pull at opposing directions??? I dunno. A problem for another day.

To your point about starting smaller and upscaling to more kts - I couldn't agree more. Exactly what you've said is how I see it needing to be. Other graphites doing just that - planning smaller and expanding only if the additional kts are demanded from their existing customers or even new ones. I think build of a 200kt plant as an opening gambit is the wrong move considering the largest producers out there currently only do 80kt - maybe hiding some additional kt that they're feeding into black markets on the down low - so let's say 100kt max. Not sure if I've mentioned here, but in Siberia awhile ago I mentioned that TON should have scoped for 100kt. Why these guys didn't do that - who knows? I would have only scoped 200kt if I was sure I could have similar or lower costs than my competitor superpits. Unless the TON plan was to cast doubt on current superpit costings as being too low and possibly incorrect? Struggling to understand TONs logic on this is all I'm saying.

But China Paul. All the stuff we read out there says their grades are crap. I disagree. Definition of something being good or bad has less to do what academics have to say in textbooks and more to do with market forces - what do the customers want. What will they pay for. Well I see customers happy paying Chinese prices for Chinese product. The Germans. The rest of the Europeans. The Americans. The Canadians. The Russians. Even other Asian countries. They're all happy with Chinese. Changing that dynamic is fraught with risk. Risk no financier will want to contend with. Cheers.