Some excellent slides, and sound reasoning in Mark Selby's...

Some excellent slides, and sound reasoning in Mark Selby's presentation:




In terms of the big driver in terms of what happened last year - why didn't we see as much demand show up as I may have initially thought and why didn't we see the start to move higher …so basically these yellow bars, this is nickel use in batteries forecast by one of the firms. The actual, at the point they kind of measure nickel going in, it only went up less than 4% in 2023.

Now the underlying demand growth when you look at cars - we've yet to see what the final numbers are for December - but we should see EV demand growth sales growth for the year between 30% and 40%.

That is great, and in terms of the amount of nickel per EV from some of those atomist statistics we talked about, we’ve seen about a 6% to 8% increase. That means that the underlying demand for nickel from the battery sector was actually up 40%.

But what happened was is sometime during these two years in 2021-2022 there was a massive inventory build as lithium prices were going up 10x. People were stockpiling materials throughout the supply chain and then as lithium prices came by they really really destocked the amount of batteries that we saw.

So what that sets us up for is, you know, when you've got a high underlying demand growth and you've been destocking for a while, when you restock again you can get a pretty violent move up. You know, sort of similar to what we saw back in 2021.

And so these two numbers are not going to really slow down as we talked about. North American sales are going to become a bigger, more influential number on the overall demand use. Again, this is why Samsung SDI wants some nickel in North America because the growth plans that these companies have is very, very significant. We're going to see total North American nickel demand triple in the next six or seven years. So this is setting the stage for a pretty significant rebound in 2024.





This is the cost curve. So the dash line that's running through there you know that's where current nickel prices are so generally a good long term floor price for a nickel bottom is about 70% of the cost curve price. And so you can see that we're well into the cost curve. if you look at individual producers in terms of where some of their cash costs are, there's a lot of names. We saw Ravensthorpe closed down this week, announced by First Quantum. They're basically closing it for minimum two years.

And so where we are right now should hold up as a bottom, and again starts to build the base for how we move higher as the year goes on.