It is WET from the WOF process, but also would be wet under a DMS process as well. The specifications for 6% spodumene concentrate generally have 9% moisture content, this seems to be grading slightly higher.
Some key points of this announcement and what needs to be shown going forward.
1. Lower grade 5.2% Li20 content and a decent price for that metric of US$802 dry metric, which would become US925 dry metric at 6% grade.
2. Suspect this ore is ore that previously would have been sold as direct shipping ore - which has been stockpiled. That ore is lower grade than the underground sections. Also because it is lower grade is probably the reason for having possibly IMO a higher moisture content.
3. Using lower grade ore, resulting in a higher moisture content, suggests WOF is working well so would be interesting how low the deleterious elements were in the concentrate. Given the price paid, suspect deleterious elements lower than specs ( a good thing). Would be interesting any comments from LTR herein.
4. Suspect the shipment was cash flow positive or close to it as initial production (i.e. first shipment). LTR to confirm - by cash flow positive, I am meaning before depreciation as depreciation is a tax concept, so it is about cash costs here.
Going forward need to show:
1. Reduction in moisture content of product spodumene concentrate towards 9%.
2. Increase in spodumene concentrate grade to 6%, and achievement of 78% recovery rate.
3. Ensuring deleterious elements are on spec.
4. Cash costs to be kept reasonable - if so, and going back to the previous work where they were stating a A$651 per tonne cash cost all looks good here - explained in these posts for those interested
Post #:
73985801
and
Post #:
73987142
, the latter post also yabbers DMT.
5. Need to get the tantulum sales happening as well as that is what drives cash costs to their stated $651 per tonne target (credits previously estimated at around A$60 per tonne)
On understanding moisture content - refer
Post #:
68006743
and
Post #:
67810162
Ramp up is happening ok IMO, but obviously this is the first shipment using ore that did not come from the underground sections of the mine where grades are higher IMO IMO
As a final point I note on the weekend a bit of discussion on graphite - if you look at SYR's share price over the last year it has also fallen by around the same % amount LTR's share price fell. Graphite and lithium stocks are heavily correlated. On graphite I gave my view in this post which is out of scope for discussions on LTR for those interested - and one needs to understand the difference between natural graphite and synthetic graphite before making comments around graphite per se and which one is currently used in producing the anode of batteries -
Post #:
72921618
But graphite is out of scope to discussions here - post on the relevant forums if interested.
All IMO
(20min delay)