Agreed, yep they have some problems. These are well documented...

Agreed, yep they have some problems. These are well documented in the HC posts. One of these was governance and continuing to plod along with an under-performing business and make a tinker here and a tinker there but not fundamentally fixing the problems. A second one was governance potentially not having sufficient experience to challenge JB, identify flaws in plans and through this process have better overall plans implemented. Changes in the board to strength it occurred in 2023 and that is now showing through with definitive decisions. Decisions like running down the RoM and stockpiling ore at site until a better pricing environment exists would not have been easy but some sort of change was needed.

To E25's credit they continued to progress the potential jewel which is using developed and patented processes to develop a within-spec western source of HPMSM. This quarterly is an interesting one in its decision to devote the majority of the first 8 pages to talking about the HPMSM project and where its at. The full-state pre-tax forecast EBITDA is US$155m or AUD245m at current exchange rates.

It could be argued that HPMSM is a specialty chemical, that's also the description applied to Lithium Hydroxide. From Statista, the market average EBITDA multiple for a specialty chemical business is 10x. The size of the prize is potentially a A$2.5b business, plus a bit for the ore operation if its on-average profitable. Its certainly a critical part of the supply puzzle. Yes the capex to deliver a potential A$2.5b business needs to be sourced but there is a lot of upside and that is the potential jewel in E25's crown. The new reporting talks about that which is good.

I'd suggest the next quarterly should go one step further and include a section - market developments in battery materials. This would talk about recent developments in LMFP and other relevant developments that have the potential to shape the future use of Manganese by the battery market. It may have also commented on the recent development around graphite space where China has announced it is implementing graphite export controls. Currently China controls 99% of the graphite processing market and 100% of the HPMSM processing market. What would it do to E25's share price if they announced a similar policy for high purity manganese?