You might be right, I really hope you are right but ...
... I don't know how much across lithium you are so what follows next is not necessarily aimed at you but more for general consumption ...
... listen to blokes who specialise in the lithium sector like Joe Lowry (yes. he's a tosser but he knows a thing or two about lithium), Simon Moores of Benchmark, Matt Fernley, Rodney Hooper from RK Equity, Daniel Jimenez, and they all say that one of the key reasons that generalist analysts like those from Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse get the lithium market so wrong is that the banker analysts take at face value the timelines given for the development of new lithium production centres. Producing lithium is not quite the same as producing something like coal, lithium is still in its infancy as a sector and so despite all the wild share movements financing a lithium project remains difficult, and each lithium deposit is unique and potential buyers from a lithium project need to prove to themselves that they can use the lithium from each deposit. Experience is that bringing lithium projects into production never runs on time.
Another source of intell on the lithium sector can be the strategy days that some of the big lithium players run. Allkem held one in April last year and the $46 billion market cap gorilla, Albemarle, held theirs earlier this week. Again, these experienced lithium producers all admit that they struggle to hit deadlines. Albemarle devoted a couple of slides to pushing that point: developing lithium resources is a long and difficult path. Here's one of the slides they used:
https://investors.albemarle.com/news-and-events/presentations/default.aspx
The reality is that for all of the frenzy about lithium there are very few working lithium mines - I've read there's less than a dozen worldwide but I've not attempted to verify that claim - so the idea that Widgie could go from rock chips to production in less than 2 years sounds a tad implausible to me.
Anyway, over the weekend I'll have a hunt around the Widgie ASX announcements to see if and why they think they can do what no one else seems able to do. As I said I really hope you have insight on something I totally missed.
