Haven't posted here for a while, breth, frankly the joint is infested with tedious non-holders and to be honest I don't much like posting here anymore, anyway. You never know if your genuine contributions are going to be erased on mystifying grounds, while other transparent agenda-pushing is waved through. Even saying that might get me sin-binned, but whatevs. I'll post same 'elsewhere' too.
As the Gimpster, oops, sorry, as Globalstocky points out, there's lots in this pair of Announcements that is easily overlooked. Not hard to do when you have to suffer a sustained chorus of mischievous down-rampers, who will repeatedly set you up to expect more from the SP in the wake of Announcements, then relentlessly belt our stock when it fails to live up to unrealistic hype. By 'it' I mean mere share price, of course, not the substance of the news...which in this case is monumental. My quick views:
- The absence of MOU detail is a big plus, not a minus. ROSATOM isn't SINOMA, it isn't SINOSTEEL, and it's certainly not one of Brad Boyle's shonky-mates-down-the-road outfits. The appearance of the marquee is enough. Multibillion dollar sector global leaders know exactly how fundamentally their mere association with junior spec would-be suppliers upends small cap dynamics. Of course MOU detail is not going to nailed down without further negotiation, and especially independent testing. This sector is awash with bulls**t 'details', most of them invented pie-in-the-sky flim-flammery. The wording, the realistic tone, the lack of hype...it's all enormously encouraging. It's of a piece with how our management works, and with how a massive global player with serious intent prefers to advance, too. ROSATOM...oh, look, stop wasting your time reading non-holding posters here who have an obvious MNS-rival agenda, and just go and do some research.
- Tied in with this is the quiet termination of our Chinese MOU's. Signals not simply our confidence in other off-take negotiations, but is also the starter gun on our long-flagged strategic market disruption intention: to bypass the established Chinese graphite status quo. The Russian-State connection at the deluxe end of our product is a serious statement of a changing game. Not just nukes, but space tech & military apps, graphene R&D...these are all areas that a purely commercial company (focussed on batteries) would struggle to fully grow into. If we can pull off a long-term partnership with a Russia expanding strategically into Africa and into high-end graphite applications, find a long-term home for our rare, high-end, hard-to-shift premium flakes...well, well, well. Huge margins on what are really a 'secondary' sales product beckon.
- Land owner payments 95% complete. There are Resettlement Action Plans, and then there is...resettlement action. There are a dozen ways to avoid actually parting with any cash despite nominally having a 'RAP' in place, if your desire is just to feed the market appearances. (Look around other parts of the sector, for example.) So when a company starts spending money on a cost like this that could easily be 'strung out' - but is a local community, a government relations, a long term 'good faith' driven one - it's because they know they will be digging.
- On the other hand, a more straight-forward logistic tie-up like the finalisation of supply chain components (a port area contract, for example), is something that can - and should - wait until necessary. We've extended the general agreement, so we retain first dibs on the details, the contract...which can and should wait until we have a better total tonnage and production timeline picture. Again, it's a testament to our management's preference for clear, step-by-step, prioritising progress, with not too much fuss about short-term SP impacts.
- And as Gimpstockguru says...the killer, the cracker, the plain-sight-big-green-flag (if you can look past the annoying critics waving their rival agendas in your peepers)...is the concurrent and ongoing other negotiations in the battery space, now 'accelerating' and expected to enable Magnis 'to report on other offtake agreements in the near term'. Spec miners don't evolve in an inward-focussed 'information vacuum' (of a Hot Copper kind, apparently!?): every one of those battery negotiating parties is looking at the ROSATOM Announcements today, too. They will grasp that, once ROSATOM start/finish testing this stuff, as many of them will already have, once MOU and finance details start to crystallise, turn into binding agreements...this little spec company...well.
None of us knows, as ever. But as usual with this management I could not be happier with these Announcements today. I like serious, slow, un-glamorous progress. I like caution, prudence, discretion and under-selling. I like to be extended sufficient space to read between the lines of Announcements myself, to have to think hard about what news means in real world terms. And there is oodles between the lines of this news - if you are prepared to look for it, can avoid the tedious flogs trying to get in your way, and are equipped with enough of an understanding of the new-looming graphite space specifically and how speculative mining companies make the transformation into production/supply companies more generally.
GLTAH as ever, breth. And...all I would suggest is (as ever) don't get distracted and made flighty by the apparently indefatigable efforts of the non-holding snipers, nor the frustrating ups and downs of the share price. Not now.
Not now, of all times.
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