Banter and general comments, page-6355

While a demerger of other assets is indeed a possibility, I don't think its a necessity and may end up being negative for shareholders relative to owning and developing resources within Core.

Firstly, If Uranium, gold and silver are demerged into 2+ different companies you then have 2+ sets of management and governance costs. Previously there was one. This is good for the corporate advisors who will clip the ticket in arranging an in-specie distribution. Its also good for the individuals collecting fees/running these companies but not necessarily the best option for shareholders. All the companies are smaller and may lack the critical size to enter key indices.

Senior management already have a substantial investment in Core. If a new management team was to run an in-specie distribution, would this new management team have a meaningful stake, or would they gain this stake by diluting shareholders with options/rights/bonus's?

You don't need to be 100% lithium to be recognised as a lithium focused entity by the big market players. For example, Mineral Resources has most of its revenue derived from iron ore. It is however part of Global X Lithium and Battery Tech ETF due to its Mt Marion activites. Global X has a significant holding of 3.585m shares (A$201m). If you can have the non-lithium assets that MIN has and be in Global X, Core doesn't need to divest gold, silver etc so as to get these big lithium funds buying into Core. It needs is to become a producer which is on-track to happen this year.

Maximum value is likely to be realised to shareholders if assets like gold are explored and then brought into production (if they have the financial metrics to warrant being brought into production). On current Lithium prices, Core is going to be generating hundreds of millions of cashflow each year which would make them an excellent owner to fund exploration (without capital raising) and bring profitable prospects into production.

The existing mangement and governance team have shown they can identify and progress a prospect through to production. I presume Biggins and others enjoy doing this. Why not utilise these skills to do it again with a different mineral? (or Lithium at a different location - Barrow creek?).

Core is not needing to pander to financiers, it has no debt and is not forecasting any debt to get into production. Its not going to be cash strapped as it enters production because there is no debt to repay over the first few years of production. This means operational cashflow is available to explore/develop a 2nd, 3rd etc prospect. In some spin-off's the parent entity simply doesn't have the resources so the prospect would sit idle if not spun-off.

Adding diversity of a 2nd or 3rd mineral means that the company is more stable if there is a lithium price collapse in the future.

Its also easy to confuse management and governance - it happens often. Governance sets the strategy and holds management to account - Governance shouldn't be doing the day to day running. Management runs things and makes operational decisions with larger decisions confirmed by the board. If this structure is operating well, it can have multiple management teams running different operations. The world has many companies massively larger than Core, so Core is not at the size it may need to split for efficiency reasons.

So I don't see streamlining as a "must do for 2022". If however Core now have no intention of progressing some of their assets yes spin it out or sell it to someone who does.