The ore reserve is at 10% but needs beneficiation to get to the...

The ore reserve is at 10% but needs beneficiation to get to the product being sold which should be around 32% to 33% product but was and may still be below that. The US$4.43 price is per DMTU on a 44% pricing grade. If E25 were producing 44% grade the sale price would be around US$195/t. While the ore may have an elemental mix closer to the 44% grade than other products, it unfortunately doesn't concentrate up to that percentage grade.

There is an unknown price/grade adjustment factor beyond just grade so the price E25 receives for a ton of 32% product is below US$142/t (at a market price of US$4.43/dmtu). How much below has been confusing to figure out because shipping costs have been bundled with the grade discount to create a net revenue figure. E25 has also been utilising a pre-payment clause making it next to impossible to precisely unpack payments.

Back to your earlier point, the in-ground value (before recovery losses) is somewhere around US$11 billion, plus or minus a few billion [260Mt * (10%/32%) * US$142/t]. Yes this is an insanely large number but its comparatively meaningless if revenue received is broadly similar to the cost to get the ore out of the ground, undertaking a beneficiation process, trucking the ore to port, shipping it to the customer and paying royalties on the sale. If E25 continues to mines at 1Mt/yr the resource is multi-generational and would last around 260 years.

Realistically E25 needs major consumers of Steel to be buying more steel so that manganese demand increases and improves the price. The soft current price is due to multiple major economies misfiring at present.