The Graphite Space: Musings and Lessons, page-72

I'd be more than willing to help out if I could @Tylemahos but unfortunately I am no Investment Banker... however I do know quite a few from my Honours days. Alas, we were in high school when Haliburton merged with Dresser; and still getting toga party loose back when Haliburton divested it's non-oil assets to those 'bankers'. I can almost guarantee none would know, or were involved in the GE deal but I will be sure to ask if I speak with any of them.

As for your theories on why KNL may have a sizable investment banker holding, viz, JP Morgan Nominees it does stand to reason. Please note: there is also a large Singaporean holding company Talisman Capital who I assumed may be related to Talisman Energy, previously BP-Canada, but more recently acquired by Repsol (damn these convoluted corporate contortions), anyway Andrew has told me before (and I think Pavbar has mentioned it to) that KNL had received significant finance from Canada. Also, interesting that the Canadian G stocks are on struggle street lately, ergo it seems one Kanuck one was smart enough to chase Tanzania back in 2009.

But back to JP Morgan Nominees, I always just assumed it was a normal level of investment however a recent chat with Mr Spinks was very interesting because he mentioned that there is no way, absolutely. no. way. that any of the Australian Wannabies (to borrow your parlance) would circumvent the traders. Which is why he was so excited about already securing pathways into Germany and hopefully into Japan via their largest graphite trader in Sojitz. As for you theory that they are nefariously trying to work their way into the supply-chain with an end-game of squeezing out the traders, I guess that holds weight in the world of the big bad bankers but it all seems a little too tin-foil hat building-7 truther chemtrail antivax to my small and blissfully ignorant world view - sorry

Just as a perfect segue here, Andrew also mentioned that Merelani is basically on ice for now. He went on to mention there is plenty of graphite at Epanko for the near term and that they could ramp up production to 200k tpa for 10 years! (assuming an extra $30m capex for expansion and staged increase over the first 5 years).

Oh and cheers for the thanks guys, it's no worries, to be honest .. I'm working on my own project at the moment and basically stuck waiting on meetings to progress, so I have nothing else to do lately

And don't mind me @Jaded ... I generally enjoy fighting off the puffery pifflers from our peers' threads. The hardest thing for me is, biting my fingers so to speak and not ALL CAPSing the sh!t out of their threads with some of the nonsense that gets spewed.

So just to summarise, Andrew Spinks firmly believes that our peers are not going to simply waltz up to the battery end users and have them sign offtakes. He stated that they will need to find traditional routes via graphite traders, where KNL has already made significant inroads into Germany and now Japan. Merelani is on ice for now but Epanko can be staged up to 200k for 10 years. Moreover Christoph asserts that natural flake will NOT be replacing synthetic anytime soon, similar to what @HappyCats was asserting yesterday.

Mostly all IMH opinion only except for the para directly above & GLTAH. Cheers, r

ps. some volume or news would be great because the standard knl fade seems to be in play ... super frustrated, the technicals are looking shee'it