Yes, not my best wording. I was replying while on the train home with fat fingers.
10/10/2018 Announcement stated: An updated HPA market report from CRU Consulting is also likely to becommissioned prior to respective investment committee consideration This seemed a little strange to me given that CRU Consulting published a comprehensive HPA report around May 2018. By definition, forecast reports have at least 12 months relevance imo.
8/06/2018 Announcement stated: Most recently (May 2018), London based global commodity consulting and analysis firm CRU Consulting (CRU),applying its robust “bottom-up” analysis and using its rich electric vehicle industry data base, forecast HPA demandof 76,000 tpa from the lithium-ion battery sector in 2025, close to 3 times the demand forecast of Petra Capital. TheCRU forecast represents a 9-fold increase in HPA demand from the lithium-ion battery sector compared to 2017.
19/02/2019 Announcement stated: Macquarie has advised the Company that the path to internalapproval will include the satisfactory completion of an independent HPA market report So CRU Consulting still NOT engaged to produce the report !!
30/04/2019 Quarterly announcement stated: Macquarie has now commissioned London headquartered CRUConsulting to conduct a HPA market report as part of itsongoing project due diligence. So somewhere between 19/2 and 30/04 CRU Consulting were finally engaged.
How long it will take CRU to produce a new report? The CRU analysts that cover HPA would be working on other projects. It will take time for CRU to ramp up for this new engagement. Based on my own consulting experience in a completely different industry, I estimate 4 weeks to ramp up, 6-8 weeks to produce the final report and 3 weeks for Macquarie to process it internally. Now we read 'the principaloutstanding input is a HPA price forecast information from theCRU Consulting market analysis.' This is what I have feared since October. Evidence the report is delaying part of the Mezzanine debt approval process. Macquarie wanted an updated report, so why wasn't it commissioned back in October? There was no justifiable reason for delaying it imo. I would rather the company had forced the issue with Macquarie and commissioned and paid for the report itself. It would be in Macquarie's hands by now. Hopefully, it will all work out OK as other mezzanine tasks are being done in parallel. I have no doubt the new CRU report will be extremely positive. The company will get to see the report but were unsure if any of the content could or will be released to the public.
ATC Price at posting:
12.0¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
