IMO this is one of the better balanced posts I have seen here in a while.
I have never said the project will be 100% a failure but IMO the odds of any resource project getting up are always stacked against you let alone a project in East Africa, in and industry completely unproven on ASX, in a commodity where China dominates (which is very hard to break at any time) with an opaque pricing structure for that commodity where there is a synthetic substitute which happens to be the incumbent technology and where no company has been able to procure project finance, not even SYR being the first, biggest and have raised $400 million in equity to boot.
These factors IMO show that the odds of success are long at best.
@richard987
I have commented many times on the lack of detailed work carried out with regards to the metallurgy. IMO the company reached their best "flake distribution" numbers and from theron in ran with them. They are no way IMO reflective of the entire deposit. There is not enough drilling data, go back and look at the drill spacings, particularly with regard to Namangale 1.
To start with changing the names from Chidya, Chawata and Namangale to Namangale North and Namangale South to Namangale 1,2 and 3 has done nothing but add to the confusion.....
The cutoffs are ridiculously low in comparison to other deposits and there doesn't appear to be any meaningful hit grade material anywhere.
The best flake is also clearly in the smallest resource.
The costs of $670 per tonne are high and are based upon estimations that I have just discussed that I don't believe to be accurate. As such I don't believe in the forecast basket price ( and I have argued why many times) . Forget the pricing of the deal with NGI, how much will it cost VRC to produce 1,000 tonnes per annum (i'm assuming equal rates of production over 5 years) when they have said its going to start lower? IMO they won't make any money at all out of that and the pricing on that volume is IMO irrelevant.
The company needs millions of dollars through to BFS (to do the detailed drilling and sampling work I've mentioned to fully understand the deposit) and it currently remains unfinanced so as a result as I have said it remains the single biggest threat whilst the share price is in decline and that's why IMO they should have raised capital already. Draw a line in the sand, stop trying to convince the market that funds don't need raising (when the quarterly clearly proves that they do) get it out the way and that will pave the way for a much clearer way forward.
IMO the EV revolution is still years away. The earl continues to mention "niche markets" and referring to GPX. I have researched that one a bit of late and they have spent so much time in country over years with a single focussed approach. It's not that simple. You can't just go from talking "EV's" to "graphene" to Niche markets to whatever is the flavour of the day.
It all comes down to project economics and the lack of visibility in the PFS shows IMO there is no real visibility to this projects economics and there won't be until the BFS and IMO that's the reason why it has traded so poorly since the PFS and also why the large institutional seller sold out.
