And speaking of good vibes, an excellent lengthy article in the WE AUST yesterday. Extract:
'Lacaze takes stock of Lynas’s return to credibility
The rare-earths producer is back on predictable ground
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Interviewed by The Weekend Australian this week, Lacaze, who has been running Lynas for 3½ years, argues that her company is now well past the turnaround phase and on its way to becoming a more predictable industrial company. “I don’t call us a turnaround business at all,” she says. “We are a good solid company with predictable products and predictable revenue lines. Maybe not as much as we would like to have but we generate cash and we have a solid customer base.”
Lacaze is proud of the fact that Lynas — the second-largest rare earths-producing company in the world — has just regained its slot as a top ASX 200 company with a market capitalisation of more than $1.2 billion. Under her tenure, Lynas’s net losses have fallen from $118.6 million in the financial year to June 30, 2015, to $94.1m in the year to June 30, 2016, to $35.6m in the year to June 30, 2017.
The latest figures, released this week, show it generated more than $55m in cash from operations in the six months to the end of December. Over the past year the company has used cash flow from operations to reduce its debt from $US425m to $US266.5m.
Rare earths are important inputs into a range of industrial products — from magnets to mobile phones, electric cars and wind turbines.
Since taking over Lynas, Lacaze has cut costs, boosted production at the Malaysian plant, turned the company from cash flow-negative to cash flow-positive, steadily paid down debt and has just negotiated a long-term contact with German engineering and automotive company Bosch that is not linked to the volatile spot market for rare-earths products. “She’s brought it back from the brink,” stockbroker Michael Evans, director of Sydney-based Curran and Co, told The Weekend Australian. Evans has been following Lynas since the heady days of 2011, when speculators were eager to get a share of the rare-earths business, particularly a company outside China, which has dominated the market. “The company’s share price got caught up in the hype and was trading in some lofty valuations even before it started building its operations, let alone producing anything,” Evans says.
“Amanda has had a tremendously positive impact on the company. She took over when rare earths were at multi-year lows, the company wasn’t generating any positive cash flow and had crippling debt levels. “At one point I’m sure many observers were waiting for it to go under. In the eyes of most of our clients the company has gone from un-investible to investible.”
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(20min delay)