A little bit if cross promotion never goes astray. 1. A lot of...

A little bit if cross promotion never goes astray.

1. A lot of red hearts on ltr for sure, who I shake my head at repeatedly. Not the ideal place to start if you want an unbiased opinion of the industry or a mining operation for that matter. An echo chamber reinforcing one's own bias is never a sound investment strategy and talking down every other lithium project in doing so.

2. Let me ask you this, why is it OK for Australian producers to expand production and not ok for China to do the same. All the while the West policies talk about wanting to circumvent China, who they cannot do without. China converts almost all of Australian spodumene and consumes majority of the chemicals in the global market.
Those who have been around for the last couple of cycles would know that the share of profit margin available across the Li supply chain moved to Spodumene producers as prices rose rapidly. By extension, a low margin at the converter does not incentive expansion of conversion capacity and had the dynamic remained, conversion capacity in China would have failed away through lack of investment. Where would the spodumene have gone then? It is simply not economical to build converters outside of China, the spod would have been stranded had the deficit of raw materials persisted for longer.
Prices were not orchestrated, it did not happen overnight. The West started rolling out policies, firb restricted chinese investment, China was forced to look elsewhere for raw materials be it Africa or domestic lepidolite.
China moved to capture more profit in a frothy price environment much like countless spodumene up and comers did, this includes ltr. Everyone was timing the market its what happens in commodity cycles. China just moved quicker, because they can, I see no wrong in that. At the end of the day economics always dictate the playing field.

3. Can you please share a link showing the lepidolite sourced chemicals were not saleable. Higher cost, unprofitable sure but that has nothing to do with saleability of a product. The source of raw material has nothing to do with saleability of final chemical.

4. Ltr shipping up to 60kt is just silly. Not sure what relevance it has to this thread but they produced ~10kt in July. To ship anywhere near 60kt they would have had to produce at 100% capacity in September, simply isn't going to happen. ~30kt would be a good start at ~5.2% despite a red heart claiming the plant can't produce below 6% because it is third gen and wasn't built that way.

5. Choice of process approach has everything to do with metallurgy of the ore, it is not an arbitrary decision. Fine grained crystal structure is more amenable to floatation recovery which is much more challenging and more expensive to get right than dms but that is all common knowledge.

6. Irs is at a completely different stage and at a very different point in the cycle, they should not be compared to a producer, sure the process to get there may be similar but that is where the similarity ends.

No ill intended to ltr or any other producer for that matter. Just tired of reading unsubstantiated posts claiming my investment is better than yours.

Aimo