With regards to the valuation, you'd have to take into account...

With regards to the valuation, you'd have to take into account the change in ownership of the project to compare the valuations right?When Ganfeng initially offer US$65 million for 5% of the project, the JV had 90% of the project, so Ganfeng were essentially paying $65 million for 4.5% of the project. That values the total JV stake at US$1,444 million.

Ganfeng now offering US$342 million for the remaining 40% stake, but the JV will now own 65% of the project (under 2023 mining code 35% to be owned by Mali Government and Malian nationals), so LLL share is 26%.The new offer for the 40% values the total JV stake at US$1,315 million, or a 9% discount to the previous valuation.

Given the change in mining code which means the JV owned less, as well as drop in lithium price and the fact that we had no other options, the price offered by Ganfeng seems fair. Of course I would have preferred more.

One thing I don't understand is why couldn't LLL hold onto its 26% stake in the project. The MOU required $60m for the settlement, and return of Morilla, but didn't say that LLL had to sell out of Goulimina. 26% of stage 1 is around 138ktpa of spod and for stage 2, it's 260ktpa of spod. Let Ganfeng run the show, and we could just pocket the cash flows.

Our share of the tonnage would be around 40% of LTR (MC of $3.4 billion), which implies we could have had a market cap of around $1.36 billion. Add in a 25% Africa discount, and that's still a market cap of around $1 billion, which is close to double of what we got through the Ganfeng offer.

Also we would have benefited from ramp upside. At full production we would be a quarter the size of PLS (MC of $12.55 billion) and with the same African discount had the potential to grow our market cap to around $2.4 billion