It's strange but not unexpected that the market responded so positively to this announcement.
People are acting like it's a special day when AGY's product is validated, but this has already happened previously with multiple companies and it's quite some years since the quality of the product was in any doubt. It's lovely to have a high quality product, but the news is years old.
As usual, JZ has strategically and cleverly used deceptive wording. In so many announcements JZ does this, and every time we see people posting here demonstrating that they have been successfully fooled. JZ did a great job here of misleading people into thinking the product was sold at a premium, by saying it was a future goal to do so. He's a great wordsmith, I'll give him that. Rob nicely explained this example above. JZ does this both in personal emails and announcements, it's really important to look at the exact meaning of the words rather than the implications you can be tricked into thinking were explicitly said.
People often accuse JZ of having bad timing with announcements, but this one was brilliant. It's a very bad day on the ASX, AGY was tumbling down, and this announcement being announced on this day was the difference between a nasty fall and at one point being up over 10%, and perhaps managing to finish the day in the green. Probably more a case of good luck than good strategy, but it is great for AGY's chart.
As for how good the actual sale is, it's silly for anyone to get excited. They've had the product sitting around for a long while, they could have sold it at any time, it's just a commodity product which can be sold to the commodity market any time they want. Doing so now as opposed to earlier was a choice, and a bad one considering they're experiencing unsustainable cash burn and could have achieved a higher price earlier. To sell now suggests they don't expect the spot price to increase before they next need a CR, and they're probably correct. It's odd they didn't sell earlier, it's not like they're selling individual paintings or antiques, they're selling a commodity product.
Overall, it's just a sale of product, it realistically didn't need to be flagged as price sensitive (though strategically of course it's better that it was) and it's no reason to think the company is worth more today than yesterday. This announcement likely prevented the closing of the gap at 7.5c today (we saw 7.9c yesterday, the price was falling, today is an ugly day on the market). Good day to sell IMO when the price jumps over 10% in response to an announcement which isn't actually value-adding; that gap is still open, and we know what happens to AGY with gaps.
Incidentally, 9c today is the fifth consecutive lower high on the chart, which sits above an open gap, with a CR looming, a bad quarterly in a bit over a week, and almost certainly a bad operations update in under two weeks!
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