Ann: Production and Financial Position Update, page-73

The above workings indicate that Grants in a restart scenario may have profitability much better than many estimates circulating. Core would appear to have paused mining at almost exactly the point when they flip from being very high costs to having rather low costs at Grants. Why exactly they would do that is a matter speculation. This part of the post is full of speculation.

Clearly when Grants restarts, people will again look closely at Core's cost structure and reported financials. If they are particularly strong there could be one massive rerate of Core's share price but I wouldn't have thought you would not go through the problems and hassles of pausing mining just to create an accounting separation between previous high costs and new low costs. New financials would have shown soon enough anyway.

Part of the reason for the pause will be weather - Jan/Feb in particular in the NT are not the months to be trying to prepare explosives in the bottom area of a pit that will collect water when it rains - knowing it will frequently rain heavily.

Part of the reason why is because Lucas had an onsite mining capacity that could mine ~2M bcm per quarter and if that capacity could be deployed to the remaining ore in Grants it would be mined out in only a few months. Ignoring wet weather issues, without a mining pause and demobilisation of Lucas's onsite capacity they would delivered 1.3-1.5Mt of ore at a speed far faster than Core was ready to receive this ore. Where is that ore going to go? At Dec2023, the ROM pad was almost full at 289kt.

Part of the reason may have been fear prices would fall close to previous cycle low's. Even with a low cost of production not much money would be made. The terminology has now changed to "lithium market conditions support such a decision." so a restart may not be as much around a big increase in prices but seeing that prices don't fall away to 2020 levels. Price was certainly a convenient factor for past management to blame because it was external to their control and drew away from scheduling issues that were something they should have had greater control around.

I suspect part of the original plan was a pause and quick restart before the ROM ran out of ore but events spiraled including GM being turfed.

Part of the reason may have been NT's new royalty scheme where new mines (or mines restarting from before 2023 operations) will get a WA style royalty fee of 5% of revenue applied. Core doesn't appear to meet the restart and flip to NT 5% royalties conditions but there may be further discussions between Core and the NT government on that point. There may still be a link between pausing BP33 early works, not releasing the DFS and whether BP33 will be subject to the old 20% of profit style NT royalty or the new 5% of revenue NT royalty. How flotation is presented in the cases may also be being considered carefully by Core so as to optimally position BP33 as being a new operation (assuming Core wants the 5% WA royalty structure).