Just to change the topic a little away from what I can only assume (from all the moderated posts) is an online version of paintball skirmish, it's an interesting thought that of the 3 countries vying for Australia's next submarine contract (Germany, France, Japan, although there may be one or two more in the background too), if Germany wins, then ThyssenKrupp's shipyards will be building it (or they'll make some new shipyards in WA). The interesting thought is that KNL graphite, which goes to ThyssenKrupp via our binding off-take, could in future find itself in our own submarines. Irrespective of the likelihood of success, you can bet that there was a lot of due diligence done by the Australian Government on ThyssenKrupp (and the other bidders) prior to us releasing our secret technical requirements and capabilities to them.
On a more relevant point for today, I'll add that I think the announcement today is a good one. We've now got a chairman, and even though AS and the team basically run the company and the projects, it's good to have a competent and experienced person in the role of chairman. While he doesn't have the same graphite specific experience of John Park (and to be fair, not many people do because there weren't many non-Chinese graphite mines in operation for the past few decades), he does have a wide range of projects from which to draw upon, including in Africa. He's also going to be able to open doors to a set of funds/investors that he has worked with previously, and which haven't yet actually considered an investment in a graphite miner. This is important, because even though we can delude ourselves on HC that graphite is the future, the reality in the investor market is that it's a niche industry. Even if global volume goes up by a factor of 10 to say 10 million tpa, it's still less than 15% of a quarter's production of BHP's iron ore. As it stands, global graphite production could fit into 3 super-carriers (which can carry up to 400,000 tonnes) and have a lot of empty room in the third ship. So a well connected chairman with a wide investor background is going to be invaluable to us.
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