Ann: Oversubscribed Share Purchase Plan Successfully Completed, page-120

haha. Well if it makes you feel any better, I bought into ltr years ago at 1.7c and ended up selling for a loss at 0.8c. Am kicking myself but as you say, thems the breaks. Lucky I bought back in ltr at the 4’s not too long ago and so have got to at least enjoy a little ride.

Yes, am patiently waiting for Cxo to heat up and get going.

i was doing a bit of reading on the weekend. Seems there are rumours going round that some of our peers are receiving lower prices for their product because of the amount of impurities that exist...

This got me comparing our iron content against some of our peers and it would seem Cxo is amongst the best of them in this regard

As desirable as a 6% concentrate is, IMO impurity levels (or lack there of) is equally important.

6% concentrate essentially means about 75% of that concentrate is spodumene, and the remaining 25% is unwanted waste that needs to be removed/extracted. If this waste is too costly or too hard or not possible to remove, the quality of that concentrate is reduced, and likely destined for carbonate production. If impurities are low/easy to extract, you end up with a high quality product that can be used for hydroxide production. This is why there is a lot of focus on iron content in spod deposits: it’s costly and hard to extract, and in order to extract it you have to give up some lithium concentrate recovery to do so.

so, even though Cxo is going for a 5.5% concentrate (so roughly 69% of our concentrate is spodumene, the remaining 31% is junk), because of our high quality, low impurity/low iron spod, there’s a good chance that our product could be perfectly suitable for the hydroxide market (perhaps this is why management have started to talk about lithium hydroxide production in 2022-2023? Perhaps this is also why Yahua are happy to pay us pricing linked to 6% concentrate for our 5.5% concentrate, as due to our low impurity, high quality spod, they wont have to spend much in processing costs to ger our concentrate ready for hydroxide? Thus, they will have concentrate supply closer to go for their new hydroxide production line which makes up part of their recent AUS$115mil upgrade). As we know, hydroxide is the product of choice.

just some thoughts

another thought: imagine when we have our stage 2 flotation plant up and running, where Mets have shown that with a DMS and flotation combo, 6.1% concentrate at over 90% recovery rate is possible. Imagine the premium 6.1% concentrate with very low impurities would fetch!

so yes, waiting for Cxo to start heating up. Hopefully we see another ‘Cxo Tuesday’ Ann tomorrow

all IMO

GLTAH