Ann: Ceramic Tile Conference Presentation, page-116

Jeez it’s hard to find this question amongst the other posts - gets wrapped up in a lot of noise.

Honestly don’t think I can answer this easily, other than people probably don’t know what they don’t know. I think Hunter33 has explained it previously about the inputs and the manufacturing process before. End users do actually need to see it’s a repeatable process and can be done at scale because they’ve set a lot of manufacturing process around the inputs. The resource isn’t like gold, silver, lithium etc where one can say it’s simply “grade is king” - it’s a very different end user market. This point is highlighted by your acknowledgement that it is hard to find a pricing available for the different kaolin going into each type of market - because they each serve a purpose and the “low” grade stuff is mainly used for paper and some coatings, where as high grade is used for ceramics and specialist coatings. Each end use attracts a different price.

This kinda explains why getting offtakes can be a journey, the end user needs to sample product before signing the offtakes. This is why Bob (and I wish he was running the show 2 years ago) has chosen established markets first, let’s get a baseline business in place then see how good the product is and start looking at blue sky stuff. If concrete gets legs that’s high margin, if they can make HPA and the reality meets the theory well we’ve got in early to a potentially lucrative business with a different product…. But only time will tell