Mate I like your breakdown, but I think you've been way too dismissive of the most important factors, being timing and resource size.
When RIO acquired Rincon, AGY was valued around 40c per share for a market cap of A$560m. Looking at it through the lens of today's economic environment, we can't necessarily say that "RIO paid this and therefore AGY is worth that". More likely we can just conclude that RIO well and truly overpaid by purchasing as hype was mounting and we were nearing the top of that cycle. For evidence of this, we can simply look at GLN who have a resource 12.5 times larger than AGY, at 2.6 x higher grade for a total contained resource about 32 times the size of AGY's resource. And yet, it has a market cap of $128m. I'm not saying this to draw comparisons with AGY; I'm using it to compare with RIO. While RIO don't yet have a JORC completed for Rincon (at least to my knowledge), I reckon even RIO's boardroom would admit that they wildly overpaid for what is ultimately a pretty low grade salar.
I think you are being way too optimistic to consider $900m a realistic sale price for AGY in the current environment. What does the buyer get exactly? The resource is okay, but it's still one of the smallest and lowest grade resources in Argentina. They'll get by with it, but it's essentially the dregs of the salar so no acquirer is going to pay handsomely for the resource itself, when they could get something similar on the cheap from PNN or ALE on the other side of the salar. So put the resource aside, and what are we left with? A mothballed pilot plant (arguably worthless), Tonopah (also worthless), some ponds, a bakery and a 2 ktpa plant. There's probably about $100m (at most) of sunk capital there, plus whatever the resource itself is worth (probably no more than $30m). That's around A$130m of asset value for AGY at Rincon (without factoring depreciation), plus a couple of million worth of carbonate in the shed. The company has no relationships of value, because it hasn't managed to secure a funding partner, or an offtake.
So really, it all comes down to the much touted "IP value". And how do we measure this? Well, by demonstrating that their process works by consistently producing lithium carbonate. The problem for AGY is that as the commissioning process drags out (we're past 2 years now), potential funding partners lose confidence, and therefore the "IP" loses value, because they've failed to make it work yet. It may work in the future, but that may take another 80 trials, and RIO could well and truly be outproducing AGY by then, and potential partners (or at least the "best deal") may have moved on. AGY's inability to meet its own targets represents a significant risk for a potential funding partner or acquirer, so applying a 350% premium seems a little crazy, don't you think?
The final point I'll make is that RIO made $14b in after-tax profit in 2022. The $1.175b the've invested at Rincon is just one month's profit to them; it's spare change from down the back of the couch. They can throw billions more at it if they want to, in order to make it work. AGY does not have that luxury.
The only things that will change AGY's trajectory right now are an imminent, significant uplift in lithium prices (unlikely) or a substantial increase in production to show that the process works and they can attract a partner. If they can't manage to increase production soon, a share price in the teens accompanied by an imminent cap raise seems pretty appropriate for the foreseeable future.
Expand
(20min delay)