Banter and general comments, page-38190

You do realise that 1H 2025 starts in a couple of months (1 July 2024). Somewhere in the past it was noted that the Board were looking to appoint a new CE before any restart. This seemed a little strange at the time because if the interim CE is competent in the job, he could commence a restart. If the interim CE isn't competent, the board shouldn't have made Greg the interim appointment and Mr English should have stepped up and become and executive chairman for the period until a new CE is appointed. Either way, a restart timeline of 1H 2025 remains consistent with this an a new CE being appointed either very late 2H 2024 or early 1H 2025.

If a restart were to take 2-3mths to implement, Core could announce a restart tomorrow but the restart itself (aka production) would not be until 1H 2025.

Taking the current price as US$1,100/t for SC6.0 Core is making not losing cash on its current activities. If you grade adjust this to 4.8%, assume a 10% further grade concentration adjustment factor and convert to AUD its about A$1,200/t. The quarterly noted a cash operating unit cost of A$964/t so until processing stops an the last cash comes in from product being shipped from that processing, Core's cash balance is on-average climbing. The actual balance in the quarterly fell due to limited shipping in that period and a huge amount of accrued expenses to be paid out. While processing ROM, Core is still generating sales volumes at previous levels. Reduced sales prices have reduced revenue. Accepted this source of revenue from processing ROM will soon end.

Quality of BP33 ore:
We know that BP33 ore remains high grade, course grained lithium deposit. Its similar to Grants and shows among the DMS recovery rates of deposits and proposed deposits in Australia. Even without flotation you can get over 60% recovery rates. The problem is two-fold. Previous management sold the ore body as being exceptional when its only good. The second is that a cheaper processing solution was adopted that didn't involve a more complex and costly flotation plant. With a flotation plant Grants and BP33 would most likely be delivering among the best recovery rates of any hard rock lithium operation. That's not a crap ore body, its the wrong flow sheet for high recoveries which can be fixed.

If GS's forecast is representative of what's showing on Market Screener, they have assumed there is no more economic to extract ore in Grants and BP33 will need to be brought online before Core gets more revenue beyond processing ROM stockpiles. They also appear to assume that capital cost is $100m. If Grants still has 1.5Mt of easily and cheaply recovered ore, valuations would increase from that 11c mark.

Global demand for EV's hasn't really slowed much at all. Its still increasing at 3-4m units/yr. What's slowed is if this growth is calculated as a percentage of the previous year volumes. World EV demand is still growing rapidly. What is slowing is China ICE demand. An article I'd found stated this as 28.3m units in 2017 that had reduced to 17.7m units (-37%). The EV thematic is not about a huge increase in the number of vehicles that consumers and businesses can afford to purchase, its about those purchasing decisions changing from ICE to EV power sources. A transition can occur even if various economies are not showing huge overall growth rates.