I attended the AGM for the second year in a row, and it's a slow burner, but the thing a lot of youse are missing, IMHO, is that to value-add from $1K/t to $11K/t takes a lot of time. Battery manufacturers require significant volumes of anode for qualification testing - hence you need the EVA plant, to produce material amounts of anode material, in the idiosyncratic formats for the dozens of cell manufacturers and architechtures, and that's been done. Then it'll be several months of testing. Like, a 5,000 cycle charge/discharge duty test takes a few months, and then the cells have to be pulled apart and analysed, etc etc.
So what's the JV timeline? Mid-22, earliest.
One thing MT did say was that EU engagement with raw materials suppliers (miners) of battery materials has increased markedly in the past 3-12 months. This is the China supply shock, for example in magnesium, prompting these bureaucrats to assess the systematic risks to material supplies required for the green energy transition. There's apparently $50B in funding getting freed up in the EU for shoring up green materials supply security.
If the government will underwrite your loans at a rate that's the lowest in five centuries, why sell 21% of your project at a WACC of >15% to Mitsui, for example, when there's essentially free money being thrown around?
I mean, MT just needs to take a leaf out of Twiggy's book here, and thrust forth his hand to get it filled up with hydrogen dollars or similar. Twiggy's getting billions in public money thrown at his hopium bullshnitzels, and no one's caring. This is coming to the EU with batteries, and if Talga doesn't take advantage of this money, I'd be shocked.
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