I think some posters here don't understand that there are two fairly distinct parts to this operation. The evaporation ponds and the processing plant. The ponds are working just fine and have been operating for a while. The grades and flow from the trenches/bores are good. The big pile of feed salts shows that it is operating at full capacity. Expanding that side of the operation is quite safe, we know it works. After work starts on the new ponds it'll be a good 9 months before they even need to think about doing any work on the processing plant, plenty of time to get the plant up to nameplate and verify everything is working at capacity. This lag between gathering the raw resource and processing it is a quirk of the brine evaporation model, as compared to a typical mine.
I don't think delaying for another year is the right call at all, I think slowing down the long-term growth would do more damage than the extra dilution now. The expansion is happening at exactly the right time for the company, nothing is being rushed. But unfortunately for the early believers there hasn't been the share price appreciation to offset the extra risks they took. I don't blame the company too much for this, they achieved the goals they said they would, on budget and (almost) on time. I think the problems over at SO4 really knocked the momentum out of the sector, the KLL price started declining just as the SO4 problems started coming to light. Combine that with the recent weakness across the global markets and I can see why instos have been keeping their money off the table. By the time KLL achieved their goal it was too late, they knew a raise was coming and waited for it. It's unfortunate, but sometimes it's just the way it goes.
We've taken a solid kick to the teeth, but, the stock market just does that to you sometimes. You have to brush it off and keep looking towards the future. The SOP price keeps going up, the economics for the operation remain solid, the project is very much derisked, the debt terms are favourable. There's a lot to look forward too. 18c is a good entry. It'll take a while to churn through that, but once profits start to roll in I'm sure we'll start to appreciate. It's still cheap based on where we'll (hopefully) be in 12 months. Most of the instos have to be in it for the long term, there isn't even remotely enough volume or hype for them to flip that many shares.
It's going to hurt tomorrow for sure, timing matters and we got it wrong. But nasty raises don't slow down good companies for long. The company still achieved what they set out to do, and I believe they'll continue to do so.
Expand
(20min delay)