Ann: December 2024 Quarterly Webcast, page-19

Hi @dynofish.
I am too hoping that there will be some important points in the coming Dec.2024 Quarterly & Cashflow report. We will see what they are. I don't want to speculate about them as there are many moving parts in our KV project atm and there are also many players in the lithium downstream market (customers), refineries, battery manufacturers, EV OEMs, etc. The geopolitics are also extremely complex atm. Very hard to predict what's coming next.

All I know is EV revolution is here and going in full steam. Most of the media are underestimating the industrial and capital power of the western world (The US and the Europeans) and its allies in Asia (Japs and Koreans) while China's lithium demand is coming to an incredible level.

In recent weeks I made a research about the technology and differences of EV OEMs factories (Tesla, BYD, WV, BMW, etc), have watched a lots of videos and read a lots of documents. I can see that there aren't much difference between Tesla and BYD factory in terms of production flow, even the robots are same brand in most factories. Majority of the jobs are being done by robots (Six-axis robots, collaborative robots, autonomous mobile robots, etc.). They do everything, from assembling the parts, welding and joining to painting. It's obvious that robotics are defining part of every manufacturing workflow. (One Million Robots Work in Car Industry Worldwide – New Record)

Btw, the quality of the parts are different indeed. For example, a Tesla induction and permanent magnet motor, its inverter, its chassis, software, etc, a lots of things are different and much higher quality than a BYD vehicle's.

Btw, iIt's interesting to see that what's going to happen to the a billion workers in China when those factories are so much automated!

My point is here that the cost of those cars in the west and China ore only the labour costs because a western worker gets maybe 5 to10 times more salary than a Chinese worker. When we consider the high automation with robots that labour cost will be not make big difference and the western EV OEMs will be able to compete with the Chinese EV OEMs by the help of customs tariffs which are increased recently.

The only problem looks like that the western OEMs need to make their own batteries, which is also on the way, and secure and procure the battery minerals which is also on the way too.

I believe the western countries and their Asian allies are waking up on all these issues. Therefore we may be able to see very interesting actions in the lithium space; mergers, JVs, offtakes with buying stakes (like LG did with LTR).

Very interesting times ahead I guess.