Actually the plan was to have debt financing in hand prior to negotiating offtake. This gives us a stronger position to negotiate. The DRC mining code has strict / prohibitive clauses on external debt financing and its now being enforced. So plan B is we likely need to work with one of our customers.
The convertors in Kolwezi are complete and require feed, they won't be buying feed from outside of the country. This window is not closed. Moreover I have heard from a reliable source that Toyota was in the country looking for offtake few weeks ago, this in addition to BMW I heard before.
I have 50/50 confidence of funding this year from a customer, won't deny we have been unlucky, but there are others who have sunk $50-80m a piece for plants that won't be processing anything unless they talk to us or put through mineralogically variable artisanal ore loaded with clay, with a long wet season to interfere with supply.
The exploration to date has put up three satellite sites that have potential to add the mine life. They have probably found more cobalt than all the Ca/Eu cobalt "explorers" combined, and its in a form that is treatable and complementary to the existing Kalongwe mine plan. There's more to test.
There are two major DRC expansions outside of Glencore KCC to keep an eye on, thats all you need to do, sadly they are private but I will share. I estimate both have an incentive price of at least $25/lb cobalt, realistically $30 in this financing environment and they don't have strong copper values to rely on and are reagent intensive with some commercially untested processing technology involved. That means they won't proceed if price goes lower, they will simply sit and wait. Additionally they face the same financing challenge re mining code that we do. All the other projects outside of these two are immaterial to the wider cobalt market. The cobalt market is not going to be satisfied or "all done" by the emergence of operations that can add 1-2ktpa in cobalt metal equivalent.
Finally - this is a copper project with a cobalt kicker, what really affects our NPV for stage 1 is copper price, which has been in the dumps. We will have strong cobalt revenue in stage 2, funded by stage 1.
NZC Price at posting:
23.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
