The two week suspension has given me some time to reflect on this company and it's management over the past few years.
I originally invested a very small amount of capital when a friend of mine told me minbos was exploring rare earths in Madagascar many years ago. My investment was then forgotten until I read an announcement regarding the successful bid for the phosphate project. Since then I have had many years of slowly accumulating shares as the story developed, I started calling the company to ask questions and get information that I could further my research, and after each big milestone I would add a little more, until my final additions in the recent weakness in the 7's. I am now fully loaded and ready for the next big stages of development.
One thing that I and many other investors place a lot of importance on, is the quality of management. This is something extremely difficult to gauge especially as small time investors, as we do not have the ability to set up meetings with management like the big funds. After many years of research, and many phone calls with the company, I am of the impression that Minbos has a high quality, very committed management team and I say that knowing some here would probably disagree with me. I often remind myself on some of the project challenges up until now and see how management addressed these issues:
- COVID delays: There were many companies that didn't make it out of COVID alive, management still pushed on despite global shut-downs and continued with assigning contractors (who worked out to be duds), but regardless, didn't throw in the towel, not only that but Lindsay used this time to his advantage and secured the green ammonia project
- Ukraine War: Management pivoted their whole business plan to produce an entirely different product on the back of fertiliser availability, this undoubtably caused delays, but will prove to be beneficial in the long run, as it greatly simplifies the processing costs.
- Inflation: A bit contentious, but management raised the majority of the cash for pre-purchasing the plant, and did to at a pretty great time, if this didn't happen when it did, who knows how much more expensive/how much more dilution we would have had.
- Off-take agreements with the IFDC: There was a lot of talk about getting some sort of off-take agreement with the IFDC, I'm not sure what happened with this, but whatever it was management managed to pivot again and sign a binding MOU with Carrinho Group, which I believe will end up more beneficial to shareholders.
There are probably many more that I haven't listed, and depending on your outlook, you could probably throw a negative spin on the above points, but ask yourselves this: Are we in the position we are today, getting ready to push forward into production, because of the decisions of a bad management team? What if we made it this far, despite all the unfavourable circumstances, because management made all the
right decisions? There were plenty of roadblocks that could have derailed this project, and imo, management showed great resilience. Sure there could have been better communication, but that certainly doesn't equal a bad management team.
We aren't out of the woods yet, but we are pretty darn close, and I personally think we have Lindsay and the resilience of his management team to thank for that. I can't wait to watch this thing getting built!
