Yes its something I have reflected on too.Who would be a suitor...

Yes its something I have reflected on too.

Who would be a suitor but ? There isnt really that many who could be. The most likely buyer for this resource is Ganfeng but I understand there was some loss of face with the booting from the board of Raymond Lui who was connected to Ganfeng. I suspect still Ganfeng will re-appear here with an offer to cofund a very big share of the project or worse case if our board / mgt cant get their s*** together, buy us out.

Arcadium are the other natural buyer ( both livent and allkem both neighbours ) but they have been to busy & distracted with all their mergers etc over last couple of years. Clearly graves has some sort of issue with us. We probably shone a light on livent's incompetence at some level. Imagine not taking up your western tenements for years which you could ahve got for basically nothing, then some upstart uber driver from Oz secures them all and then to boot you realise you dont have space for ponds and then you have to waste years fcking around with some sort of hybrid dle tech meaning your scale up has been nothing short of dismisal over the last decade. Imagine now going to your shareholders ( of which I am one via the merger of Allkem) and telling them you want to buy for hundreds of millions what you could have bought 10 years ago for petty cash.

None of the really big majors would care about Gln, simply far to small move their needle. That Glencore was even worried about doing an offtake for us I did find a little surprising. Plus BHP still have the silly view that the cost curve in lithium is far to flat ( hence you cant build a moat) to warrant their interest , which the converse of that explains why they are looking more to copper as the scale of projects of there are so huge, moats more naturally come into existence.

I think the other impediment here is jurisdiction. Doing business in Argentina is difficult and requires a lot of cultivating of relationships with local politicians ( something JP has done well on) and understanding South American culture. Something major aussie companies like Pilbara or Minres would struggle with and again I dont think our project would really move the needle for them either as much as Minres has expressed an interest in non hard rock lithium.

The other party who might have some interest is Albermarle and SQM. Albermarle was obsessed with its diversification into liontown until later part of last year but now that has fallen in heap wouldn't be surprised if they showed some interest in this asset.

Finally there is SQM. Again very natural suitor given they understand brine, are further are losing from memory 50 % of their operations in Chile to the state run Codelco from 2030. Given 3/4 qtr's of our operational staff are ex SQM, I am not sure they may want to be "remarried" to the same old partner but.