Ann: Half Year Accounts, page-139

I'm not just referring to the share price at all. The share price is a result of the disastrous state of the company, and I made plenty of reference to that disaster.

Perhaps the most relevant point (which I did discuss in the post you're responding to) is that the company admitted it was not viable to continue attempts to get their plant/technology working just shortly after the ATL deal. AGY clearly had at least some idea this was highly likely at the time the ATL deal was signed. Nothing about the situation was sudden - the lithium price had been low for a long time and they'd spent years without success attempting to make the plant work. Clearly the decision to mothball it indefinitely was already on the radar of management. Do you really think ATL would have made the investment if they knew this was about to happen? Can you honestly claim that ATL doesn't now regret the deal? Surely you couldn't actually take yourself seriously if you made that claim.

Now, even if you did want to say they were happy with the long term outlook etc etc, which would be completely insane, it would be ridiculous to say that they would have been happy with the timing. Why pay 14c when you know there's an imminent event (C&M) which is going to crash the share price meaning you can invest at a small fraction of the cost? Unless they deliberately wanted to throw millions of dollars away, they were either stupid or mislead or a mixture of both (probably the case). Clearly AGY didn't inform ATL about the upcoming C&M which they obviously knew about, and clearly ATL didn't do proper due diligence or they wouldn't have made such a stupid deal.

Briefly summarasing the answer to you six questions (which yes, can be reasonably answered), they may not need the product imminently and sure, the quality of the product was good, but a company which is indefinitely not producing and will probably never produce meaningfully is useless. AGY is by no means the only supplier of good quality lithium. Presumably, ATL figured that since they didn't need enormous quantities like a large scale car manufacturer, even if AGY wasn't producing at full output, there would be enough to be relevant to them. Let's not kid ourselves, we all know that ATL assumed the 2,000TPA plant would be putting out product ongoingly and at an increasing rate rather than on stagnant production rates or shutting down entirely.

Surely no one is actually delusional enough to think that ATL would have made the deal if they knew the plant was going into C&M. Surely no one is actually stupid enough to think AGY didn't know this was very likely (they probably knew for sure) that C&M was coming at the time the ATL deal was made. Clearly this shows they were mislead or didn't do due diligence. The only alternative is that AGY genuinely didn't know, which would mean AGY's management is extraordinarily incompetent and detached from operations of their own company.