Yes big news!
It is sad that the average Australian lithium investor is very under researched and just sees deposit in Australia and lithium and thinks that is all there is too it.
Size, easy to mine and purity matter....and that is all that is relevant in the end. CATL the world's largest lithium ion battery maker have made a big statement being behind the 10 Mtpa start up for AVZ which will probably ramp up quickly to 20 Mtpa with their need to fulfil their billion dollar contracts with major car companies. Because of this you can expect AVZ's mine to be built ASAP!
Meanwhile back in LTR world their nearly at $2 and what have they got.....and expensive underground mine to build
($67 million just to dig the hole) which does not even capture all their mineable resources and open cut section that is low grade and has high strip ratio so basically inefficient and expensive to mine. The piece de resistance for me is that they will only be producing a piddling 2 Mtpa output.
Compare this for AVZ's 10 Mtpa start up:
Also AVZ has major share price re-rating catalysts
I.M.M.I.N.E.N.T. this quarter, and LTR is going on about its upcoming DFS, but what I find is that a DFS does not necessarily translate as a big SP catalyst. For instance when PLS got there's in 2016 the SP went down.
My point is why would you want to be pouring money into LTR when there is a company AVZ with catalysts that can have us rerate significantly, and significantly we are not a pretend company we have major offtake deals
(2 times greater than PLS 2 plants combined! which has a current market cap of 6.6 Bn! ) to supply the world's largest lithium ion battery maker CATL! , and a projected longer term output that would bring our market cap over 5 billion, so there are bags to be made from here!
AVZ short term rerating catalysts:-collaboration agreement and HEPP-SEZ-tax, royalty and duty benefits including VAT exemption and tax holiday increasing the economic bottom line and decreasing an already amazingly short payback period-mining licence-BFS-expecting major increase in already stellar NPV/IRR, plus shortened payback period with increased resource from wedge drilling, tax benefits from SEZ, the huge increase in output to a 10 Mtpa plant + 2 primary lithium sulphate trains-more funding from DFI's to add to our already $400 million US injection-feasibility study for hydroxide plant-further offtakesExciting times ahead for AVZ investors!
AIMO
BTW This is what investors should understand regarding our lithium deposit and the ability to convert it to battery grade and why we are a stand out to other lithium companies.
High-level independent metallurgical test verification of Manono's lower iron, fluorine and phosphorous levels - and projected significantly lower open pit stripping rates - underline the incredible latent value in the DRC project.
"We think this project is completely different to every other project out there because it is so large - we're not talking about 10m-wide zones, it's 200m," says Ferguson.
"But it's not just about being the biggest in the pack, it's very much about that scale translating into value, which comes back to quality.
"It's the nature of the beast at Manono, with such a big, wide [pegmatite] body; it's cooled slowly, so we've got large crystals and a cleaner pegmatite. We've literally got, one side to the other, a single zone, and the wall rocks are black, and the pegmatite is white … so we can just strip it down either side and not worry too much about dilution. It's pretty much 1.65% all the way through.
"SCT, which has designed about 85% of all the hydroxide plants in the world, have said they've never seen such a clean product - just really high grade and no detrimentals of any issue whatsoever. We have low fluorine, very low phosphorous, the iron is down to 0.4% in the product … and we'll probably get that down further with more tweaking. There is 2-4% mica in the body itself, but once it's processed it's down to … less than 1.5% mica, and we'll get that down further too."