My take is the company want to (and do) own the technology, but do not want to build and run the plant on their own, so they created a new company, and I'm assuming brought in people who are capable and they trust, and offloaded that burden onto that new entity.
If I recall correctly, NMT also own a stake in critical metals, but I may have this wrong.
Regardless, building and operating processing plants is not where the company want to be, and it isn't a very scalable business model when trying to expand globally with all of the regulation and overhead in each country, you'd really want to work with established local partners.
