Hi ThesiThere seem to be a number of inaccuracies in your...

Hi Thesi

There seem to be a number of inaccuracies in your post:

"If Tesla had hoped to receive supply from James Bay, maybe that will still happen, or maybe Toyota might not want to provide that to them. This deal very much placed the ball in Toyota's court. Whilst I have heard commentary that the merged entity might make a good takeover target, I am wondering how easily that might be achieved with Toyota having 15% ownership."

As others have noted, post-completion Toyota will own more like 6-7%. This is a decent stake but unlikely to be a blocking stake. However, as I noted in one of my posts yesterday though, the combination of no talk/no shop/no DD clauses and break fees means it's going to be pretty hard for someone else to lob a takeover bid, or for GXY to accept any such bid.

In terms of James Bay supply, holding 6-7% of shares on issue won't get you the ability to block strategic partnerships with other companies that would otherwise benefit the company - it's not even enough to get you the ability to appoint one board director, so that's another non-issue.

"I would also put to everyone that by Galaxy not presenting to the market a plan for a converter tied to James Bay at the time of that announcement that it affected the share price negatively, and I would use Piedmont as an example of what might have occurred had they bothered to do so. - This would have probably improved Galaxy's shareholders value going into the new entity."

I think most here would agree that the reason Piedmont shot up late last year was not simply because they had a converter, but rather because they announced a sales agreement with Tesla, so I think the comparison is a bit disingenuous. Also, you know companies can't just announce things that they have no intention of doing, right? That's against the law (see s 1041H of the Corporations Act). Clearly, without the scale of the combined entity GXY did not view a converter as something that was financially viable (or sensible) for them to do alone given the amount they had to spend developing SdV in parallel, so they didn't announce it. Simple. Conversely, if they had tied up with a partner for the development of a converter, that would have diminished the value in the merger for Orocobre, because a significant part of the upside to James Bay would be gone. In fact, this is where the benefit of the merger comes: they now do have the ability to pursue development of a converter with a partner, and somehow you don't like it, despite pushing for that to have happened for the past two months!

"Also, we could see that Galaxy's share price yesterday morning didn't match the merger attributed value.... Galaxy was well ahead...."

What on earth are you talking about? Orocobre and Galaxy traded pretty similarly all of yesterday and continue to do so. The "merger attributed value" is directly in proportion with their respective market caps, at 45.8% GXY and 54.2% ORE...

"I also wonder how pleased Simon Hay really was with this deal, because if you listen to his answers to the questions I provided, it appeared to me that he was not and was just going through the motions he was told to do."

This seems to me to be the proof that you are for whatever reason just biased against GXY and are searching for things to retrofit your views. Because what I heard on the conference call was a very confident Simon Hay, who not only participated actively in the conversation, but in fact jumped in to expand enthusiastically upon many of Martin's answers. For example (and this is just off the top of my head), when Martin was asked about synergies between the two companies, Simon jumped in and expanded on certainty of supply and bargaining power of the combined entity, when Martin was asked about cultural differences between the two entities Simon jumped in and enthusiastically talked about how they had worked together over a prolonged period and how the similarity in assets across Argentina meant they were well-placed. If anything, I left the call thinking that Simon should be the man in charge, as he often had the more substantive answers...