Ann: Trading Halt-TNG.AX, page-86

Germany’s SMS eyes TNG vanadium mine

• Bridget Carter, Gretchen Friemann
• The Australian
• May 5, 2016 12:00AM
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• Bridget Carter
  
  Mergers and Acquisitions Editor
  Sydney
  Bridget Carter is Mergers and Acquisitions Editor at The Australian, and has also covered property and construction for the newspaper for more than four years. Additionally she's written about logistics, crime, and social issues. Bridget does a weekly cross to the Sky Business Channel.
  Gretchen Friemann
  
  Mergers & Acquisitions Editor
  Sydney
  

The Germans missed out on the Australian submarines contract to the French. But it looks as if they are about to get deeply involved in the $970 million Mount Peake vanadium-titanium-iron project in the Northern Territory, owned by ASX-listed TNG.

TNG went into a trading halt yesterday pending an announcement involving the German engineering and construction giant SMS, previously flagged as a group likely to become involved in the building of the refinery for Mount Peake product at Darwin.

When TNG comes back from a trading halt it wouldn’t be surprising if it had put out a smallish placement to SMS to cement their new relationship. But more to the point is SMS’s history of being a regular user of Germany’s Export Credit Agency scheme, meaning it could help provide part of the financing that needs to be secured before Mount Peake becomes a reality.

Like all export credit agencies, the base motivation is to secure outgoing exports — read jobs — for a country’s domestic industry by leveraging off the national balance sheet to help secure financing for Mount Peake-type projects.

The world is not exactly short the titanium or iron that Mount Peake would produce.
But it is a different story with vanadium, an increasingly strategic metal thanks to vanadium redox batteries that are seen as an answer to large-scale power storage, such as being attached to power plants or electrical grids
Additional reporting: Barry Fitzgerald