MD/CEO and BoD - why do they still have jobs, page-63

FiendishRedBeard and Cartex good comments.

I see it slightly differently. I blame the CEO FAR LESS than I blame Jim Askew. Jim has made some terrible decisions. The worst being plant, personnel and the capital raising(s).

Jim decided to build a plant which needs to produce 2750,000 tons to be cost competitive with the Chinese. That is 50% of the entire market. Even with the most optimistic demand scenarios Syrah was always going to have problems. FRB, while starting at 20MT per year would have been a bad idea, Syrah could have easily had a plant that came on at 100MT and allowed for large incremental increases in tonnes. Shaun has inherited a mess.

Jim also hired an engineering firm which had never built a graphite plant to design the operation. Brilliant. I wonder why they have struggled with flotation and still have 70% recovery? Because the engineering firm had no experience?

Jim abruptly removed Tolga. Tolga was not the person to take this company forward but surely Jim would have had a transition plan in place. Surely he would have identified a few people within the graphite industry who might have both experience and leadership. No...didn't do that. The company went without leadership for 5+ months. In the end they settled on an internal candidate with no graphite experience.

Jim decided to hire Shaun, with no experience in graphite, to run sales and marketing. If I'm correct, Syrah just handed over sales and marketing in their largest region to a local firm. Another very important failure which has cost the company precious cash flow and shareholders millions.

Jim and Shaun both decided to staff aggressively with local staff. It makes for a nice story. But their lack of experience also contributes to disruptions, fires and poor yields.

Jim has RARELY bought a share. Very few boards have leadership which have not made a significant financial commitment to the company they oversee. But not Jim Askew...although he did buy 100,000 shares after the recent announcement. Too little, too late. Sorry Jim.

In addition to Jim's lack of commitment to the company it is clear he has no sense about capital markets. At the end of May the firm stated that both prices and production would be improving. They then hired a firm from Hong Kong to run marketing. Surely they would have let these benefits flow through to the stock price before announcing a capital raise. No.

You can be certain they were having conversations with bankers and the Super in early June. They watched the share price tumble almost 30%, then waited for the announcement that Syrah was being deleted from the ASX200, THEN they announced a capital raising. At any point in this process Jim could have stopped the process and told the bankers the deal was off. They have $40 million in the bank, and to quote them, Q3 losses would be narrowing considerably. They had time.

Syrah's investors have been willing to support the capital raisings to build Balama and get BAM started. We are now being asked to funding operating costs because of Jim's bad decisions on building a poorly designed plant/mining operation.

Jim is a mining engineer. He has failed at the mining portion of his job. He has been terrible in most other areas as well. There is no way he can lead this company through a battery revolution.

This was never going to be easy, but he has mad a tough situation worse. You don't get to screw up this much and keep your job. It's time for him to go.