I have a concern about some possibly misleading information within the AGM presentation. You see the chart on page 9 implies Tesla is building and will be solely responsible a gigafacroty, and this demand is ready to be captured, when that’s not actually correct. No entirely anyway.
See, Tesla are the sexy name used to sell the product, the batteries, but it’s not actually their product. Feel free to review the tesla website below for yourself if you have any additional queries. A couple main highlights;
- “Panasonic will manufacture and supply cylindrical lithium-ion cells and invest in the associated equipment, machinery, and other manufacturing tools based on their mutual approval”. You see Panasonic will actually build the cells, Tesla only manages the land.
- And here; “Tesla with Panasonic joining as the principal partner responsible for lithium-ion battery cells”.
- But there’s more; “Panasonic's lithium-ion battery cells combine the required features for electric vehicles such as high capacity, durability and cost performance”.
The point I’m making is Tesla isn’t latent demand, on the contrary, Panasonic are actually spoken for. They already have a supply agreement through Sojitz.
Further to that, I’m not even sure Tesla (read Panasonic) will be in a position to take more than the product of one mine. You see the 2015 market for graphite in batteries was 125,000t which was made up of 90,000t natural-flake and 35,000t spherical-graphite. By 2020 Tesla is talking about consuming 112,500t of natural-flake-graphite to make 45,000t natural-flake-spherical-graphite (this may increase with their increased orders).
My point is customers don’t grow on trees, they require work. A lot of quiet and diligent work. And most of them are already spoken for. Companies don’t just invest a billion dollars hoping to connect the dots later, when convenient.
Maybe management should be asked about the graph and what it implies?
https://www.tesla.com/en_AU/blog/panasonic-and-tesla-sign-agreement-gigafactory
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=led to&oq=led to&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.879j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&safe=active#safe=active&q=tesla future demand natural flake graphite
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/bus...z/news-story/31cb7b695b647711d195bcb8d0fbe691
(20min delay)