This is a really good post. AKE and Livent management have no doubt made mistakes, but the remoteness of Argentina is a hard place to successfully manage scientific orientated commercial operations. They should be given some leeway here.
Martin’s team tends to be criticised very hard, yet others in the business are given a relatively free pass. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, so I now believe that people often confuse good speakers in interviews, Q&A, and presentations with good management. They are not the same.
The reality is that all management teams in lithium have made very serious mistakes. PLS is again a prime example. They have the most articulate and best speakers by a country mile. It is very difficult to argue that they don’t have the best management team in the lithium business, yet, I feel strongly that no reasonable person can deny that cancelling BMX auctions has not been hugely damaging to retail share holders. The decision not to publish auction results in near real time took away the only real independent price transparency mechanism that existed for retail holders. Ending the auctions didn’t matter one iota to the big boys, they clearly had more reliable data, but the data they generated were hugely important for retail holders. Many retail would have sold at higher valuations had it been kept going. Martin’s team has done nothing as remotely destructive to retail holders wealth as that one decision, yet they get hammered.
AKE Price at posting:
$9.13 Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
