Production risk, page-7

hi Prime1 i think you are confused about mesh sizes. Here are what you find in the industry :
+32 mesh +50 mesh +80 mesh +100 mesh -100 mesh -200 mesh -325 mesh

See this link for example :
https://www.globalsources.com/gsol/I/Graphite-product/p/sm/1153683822.htm#1153683822

both +100 mesh and -100 mesh can hardly be considered as large flakes. Syrah calling +100 mesh as coarse graphite dosent change this industry standard fact and wont transform +100 mesh into large flakes.

As for small flakes becoming more valuable in the future than large flakes you are absolutely wrong for two main reasons :

1- large flakes offer flexibility and will always be preferred to small flakes. You can micronize large flakes into small flakes but you cant glue small flakes together to produce large flakes. Many industries require large flakes including the nascent graphene industry. Large flakes are scarcier in nature and they command premium prices.

2- expandable graphie requires exclusively large flakes. Its a booming high growth value added graphie market

Of course batteries use small flakes as feedstock to produce spherical graphite and its a booming high growth market too but small flakes are abundant in nature and there is synthetic graphite as competitor to spherical natural graphite fighting for market share. 

The abundance and over-supply of the market by natural small flakes and the competition with synthetic graphite will ensure prices will remain subdued for small flakes as feedstock material for batteries. On the other hand for expandable graphite there is no alternative to large flakes and they are scarce in nature ensuring increasing prices trajectory for large flakes in the future.


anyway i see small flakes graphite feedstock for batteries as a commodity and prices of small flakes will be set at the marginal cost of the lowest cost producer (syrah 400$ per tonne ?) resulting in extremely low margins. The money is in value added graphite : spherical graphite and the even higher margin expandable graphite.