A couple of things I picked up from the Annual Report. First up the MD Scott Winter indicated in his letter that "The scoping study works commenced late in the 2023 financial year and are expected to complete early in the new financial year." You beauty, movement! I say that as they have also recently admitted that the pilot plant work that was supposed to be undertaken in calendar 2023 has been postponed to the first half of calendar 2024. Not the most active of companies I have to say.
The other bit is about one of the non-executive directors, Steven Kovac who is the CEO of Idemitsu Australia Pty Ltd. Through a subsidiary Idemitsu Australia Pty Ltd holds about 32% of the CMG share registry and also has 15% of the WA explorer, Delta Lithium. SK is also a non-executive director at Delta. Delta got some media interest recently when Kiwi Chris Ellison of Mineral Resources monstered his way onto the Delta share registry and into the Delta board room.
Why does any of this matter? Well, the Idemitsu morthership back in Japan is the second biggest oil refiner there and clearly it is wanting to spread their risk into new metals technologies (unlike Exxon Mobil that just doubled down on hydrocarbons by paying US$60b to buy an oil shale business). Frankly, the amounts of money Idemitsu has invested in Delta and CritMin is chicken feed for it but you know the company is serious about transitioning when it does a deal with the Toyota mothership to make solid state lithium batteries.
Here is a link to an article that @clivemax posted on the Allkem threads, where Toyota and Idemitsu are working together, aiming to start producing solid state lithium batteries by FY28: Toyota Idemitsu tie up
The Japanese are good at thinking laterally with what they produce, they focus more on core competencies than business sectors. The classic was the revolution in cameras becoming a phone feature not a product. Kodak saw itself as a camera company and went broke while Fuji saw itself as a film company and migrated into medical imagery. It would seem that Idemitsu sees its core competency as somehow being tied in with electrolytes and energy storage and is moving into batteries. With its interactions with Delta and Toyota Idemitsu is focusing on lithium and lithium batteries and hopefully with CritMin it intends to focus on vanadium and vanadium batteries.
FWIW I have followed Allkem for many years, since when it was a total long-shot, and for much of that time a Toyota associate company has been a strategic investor in what back then was called Orocobre. If not for Toyota Tsusho stepping in a couple of times to provide financial and leadership support I think there is little doubt Orocobre would have gone broke a decade or so ago. I suspect CritMin has the prospect of a long journey similar to what Orocobre faced 15 years ago but having a major Japanese corporate such as Idemitsu acting as back stop is a massive positive imo. Having the Qld government championing the vanadium sector in nth Qld is also fantastic (in contrast, back in the day Orocobre had to fight tooth and nail to win the various Argentine governments over). But what will kill any chance that CritMin has of growing into a major player in the vanadium battery sector is if management takes the foot off the pedal and try to cruise along. They just have to keep setting themselves targets and deadlines and keep exceeding expectations.
