Depends on whether you are looking for a company that delivers...

Depends on whether you are looking for a company that delivers superior capital gains or a company whose boss is a smooth talker.





One of the sleights of hand from the ex-Goldman Sachs guy is to lead people into thinking that Allkem shareholders will do better under Livent control. Sure there might be an initial kick if Allkem were to trade on a US bourse as a component of the merged entity but that has nothing to do with Pall Graves. He's been in charge of Livent as a stand-alone entity since 2018 and for a lithium play Livent under his baton has delivered underwhelming results. Nothing of substance suggests that his chronic under-performance is about to turn around. And everyone says that developing and operating lithium mines, both hardrock and brine, is technically challenging but Mr Graves is an investment banker, not a geologist or a mining engineer or an industrial chemist. The bloke brings nothing to the table other than sounding like Thomas the Tank Engine and having unlimited self-belief.

And even the spin that shares in mining companies get rerated just by being US based is obviously balderdash seeing the number of major mining companies that continue to operate on other stock markets. And access to deeper capital markets? Allkem currently has no corporate debt and is only thinking of taking on a $200m debt facility so the credit rating agencies can have something to work with. I'm pretty confident that if Allkem sent out a flyer about a debt raise it would be swamped by international banks trying to out-bid each other.