1. Elon made comments about wanting miners to source ethical, environmentally friendly nickel.
2. AUZ has said they are in negotiations with potential offtake partners about details including price, volume and timelines.
3. Tesla is about to make what is anticipated to be some significant announcements about where they see battery technology progressing. If as expected they make announcements about batteries requiring more nickel, this could have an impact on the demand and price of nickel moving forward. This would be in line with Elon’s comment about the responsibly sourced nickel since it wouldn’t make sense to make a comment like that about something you don’t need. Sure, other battery makers don’t need to follow Tesla’s lead on battery technology, but generally when one company figures out how to do something cheaper/better/more efficiently, it’s competitors try to copy ASAP.
4. The prices of the commodities will form a big part of finance discussions.
Could it just be that AUZ thinks that there might be some announcements made which will have an impact on the market for nickel medium to long term which they would like the chance to observe before trying to come to any agreement with an offtake partner around volume, price and timeline? Imagine they went ahead and locked in a price for X amount of nickel that would be paid upfront by an offtake partner to help finance the mine and then based on imminent battery technology announcements, the price of nickel went up 20% in the short term. In the grand scheme of things, if waiting for battery day and whatever information will come out adds 4 weeks to the process, who cares.
People around here carry on like all BB had to do was walk down to the local bank and organise a $50k top up of his home loan for a reno to pay a builder he found on gumtree.
AUZ Price at posting:
1.6¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
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