Yes and no. And please - nobody take anything I write as...

Yes and no.

And please - nobody take anything I write as anything other than my opinion.
I don't mind anybody disagreeing with me at all. DYOR always.

Conditions B and C may look like a walk in the park from where we are, but if you read them as
b) having delivered a 30% increase in nameplate from the 120kt mark announced around this time last year
and
c) actually selling $50m of that spodumene
then they start to look pretty good as far as recent achievements.
They are weighted about 40% of the options.

I'm most focused on A (keeping share price comfortable 50%ish higher for at least a month) and D (having done the deals to progress SDV or James Bay).
About 40% of the options relate to these 2 criteria.
They are also where our hip pocket gets a benefit from their actions.
You could say that both are the results of simply putting one foot in front of the other, but to achieve A then its reasonable to assume that its only made more difficult by any further dilution. It is also reasonable to assume that A is going to very much tied to D.

It isn't a condition related to market cap.
It is conditional on keeping value of the post consolidated share price at around the relative levels of our recent high for at least a month. That implies a share price that has likely already punched much higher (touching the current value 70s at least) and survived some significant resistance and profit taking from achieving new highs.
If D (SDV/JB plant ahead) without dilution then this too is a good indication of a good deal being struck.

The common theme here is that Evil Management are going to dilute like crazy now - because they can. In that case we (and, importantly, they) aren't going to see A happen.

A is a contract with management to increase significant value to our current share price without dilution, or even the hint in the market place of it being necessary for the next step into SDV or JB.

E and F relate to rewarding length of tenure.
We have the rights to spill management if we choose to do so by vote.
We haven't really seen Bacchus and Turner at work yet but they have golden CVs and Bacchus' current legal work with LPD should give him some valuable insight into the real state of alternative processing. I'm not convinced there is any corporate interest in these companies at the moment but its good to have a board who are getting solid understanding of any possible developments in lithium processing. Having a M&A specialist legal mind on the team is pretty important for an expanding company, that may need to also defend itself at any time.

The way I read it at the moment is that these achievements are the hand being held out for the next 2 years of working their butts off for share holders and our share price.
I'd be surprised and disappointed to see them repeated next year.

It's up to every share holder to judge the quality of their work and whether they feel the management team deserve incentives/reward.

Back to finance..

I believe that the best method for any Galaxy asset financing of the future is selling future offtake for SDV and James Bay. Our status as a current producer probably adds a decent amount of credibility to our clients for being able to deliver.

The difficulty we have been in for the last few months (and the financial issue that possibly faces all future new mines looking for selling of future offtake) is that when you do this, ie forward selling with prepayment of ie 50% for offtake, you are expending the prepayments on capex and still have to then cover opex without payment until delivery.
However, this time around we have Mt Cattlin turning over cash at full tilt to cover the shortfall and opex of at least one of these operations.

The simple maths for SDV is that the cost to build a ton of processing is approx the same as the current price of carbonate. Hydroxide even higher price tag (by approx 25%).
That is also something to bear in mind for how the plant eventually scales up to 50kt.
Each year SDV could put a specific % of its own profits to building more ponds and adding to plant capacity.

If Galaxy can lock in future sales of SDV product then it only needs to cover the costs of production. It seems they may go with a plant that foregoes the potash production (and saves on capex but loses potash credits by doing so).
Means that they would have costs of about $3.3k per ton (no potash credits price).
That is a cost of $82.5m USD to produce 25kt (carbonate worth approx 5 times that amount).
That means Mt Cattlin could cover SDV's opex completely.
Particularly as it will probably be spread over 2 years to scale up to nameplate.
SDV may also be able to contribute in a smaller way to its own capex costs from the incremental expansion of its test plant.

James Bay (I'm going to leave aside the co-located processor for the moment) could already be built from free cash flow from 2 years with a price tag of approx $150m-180m.
If Galaxy was to let SDV calmly progress through to test plant using the $60m CR cash
then the company could turn its attention to building JB this year after the DFS.
I'm starting to think that JB may actually be the next main game as it represents a much easier capex hurdle and can initially supply existing clients before building its own processor.

This gets a little too much for my puny mind to do all the forward calculations but it becomes a close run thing when you have Mt Cattlin in there to underwrite the dual expansion, with a debt facility to cover additional gaps.

Too many moving parts for me to lay it out clearly but you can already see that Mt Cattlin PLUS offtake could contribute the lion's share of capex before JB and SDV then come online to clear the remaining debt with their own production.

This is very very rough - but the 3 assets at name plate production is what I came here for.

SDV at 25kt ($15k/t carbonate) = $375m USD/year (costs $82.5m)
JB at 160kt ($900/t spodumene) = $144m USD/year (costs $48m?)
MC at 160kt ($900/t spodumene) = $144m USD/year (costs $48m?)
approx $500m USD annual free cash flow.
$5-6b market cap?
$10-12 (post consolidation) share price for 2020?