Ann: E25 HPMSM project selected for US$166M DoE Grant, page-243

The market is clearly presuming there is a big CR coming. The market might be right, or it may be wrong. What is clear is the market has decided not to price in very much of the potential value from an HPMSM plant with half the capital cost coming from Grants and another US$105m of known trade financing.

What is emerging is a potentially very large need for HPMSM within America, no existing plants and very few well advanced projects. This sort of scenario can flip the situation almost overnight from, nah - that projects never happening to OMG it is, and its going to be big. This flip might occur, it might not. That's one of the risks of investing in pre-production investments.

E25 has done surprisingly well (so far) at not having its shares on issue balloon. They have stated they are looking at loan options and have previously stated the receipt of term sheets re HPMSM. The project hasn't had a FID so they are clearly struggling to complete their plans. What's the roadblock, that's unclear but its a safe bet that Trump's tariff's have put delays into the plans of many battery related project as they do re-evaluations/changes.

The 5 primary options E25 have for financing the HPMSM gap would appear to be:

• Sell part of the project and shift from 100% ownership
• Trade financing from further off-takes
• Loan facilities from someone? (who?)
• A large CR
• Selling other assets (but do they really have other assets with enough value - it doesn't seem they do)

There is a large gap between the planned capacity of Stage 1 and currently agreed off-takes. This indicates either unfounded optimism in the scale of the proposed facility (presumably the markets current view) or a pile of incomplete negotiations with some big industry players (my personal guess). If there are ongoing discussions with big industry players, potential exists for a big announcement to drop at any time.

We wait (and most days the share price drifts lower as people give up waiting)