Uranium, Tesla, Magnis........ and the TON name change: RIP
The Tesla 2015 AGM ( ) is well worth a listen in that during the Q&A section it is strikingly clear that their shareholders invest in the company because they believe in a greener, cleaner future. I would be very surprised if Tesla shareholders would tolerate one of their suppliers having uranium interests... which leads us to analysis of MNS's actions: publicly stating its intentions to divest its uranium assets....
I rung the company yesterday hoping to get a little info about progress on this front. I was told that the board is definitely still working through various options. I asked whether our uranium interests had become an obstacle to potential off-take partners and was told that the fact that we have not done anything with them for the last few years and that we have declared our intent to divorce from uranium has been interpreted positively.
I have been looking at Canadian and Australian graphite companies trying to put myself in the shoes of someone like Tesla to figure out who they might partner up with:
They have made it abundantly clear that they are all about reducing costs and want suppliers to be in their backyard wherever possible. Experts have also estimated that they may require up to 80ktpa although, this assumes a traditional spheroidizing model that requires medium flake raw material of roughly 3 x finished product. MNS's jumbo flake could very easily reduce wastage and therefore reduce the amount of raw material required which, translates to significant cost savings (not to mention savings through greatly reduced purification processes because of initial 99.6% purity). Although the Canadians may be closer in location, they all fall down in either size of planned production (small deposits), high operating costs, poor purity or poor flake distribution.
SYR have heaps of shite flake that could provide raw material for synthetic but I seriously doubt that Tesla can stick with synthetic (if it is currently doing so), and SYR as a natural flake option is unlikely to meet specifications. In March 2014, Bloomberg ran an article implying that synthetic graphite consumers like Tesla were contributing to the pollution problem in China and to global warming generally. Musk was furious and tweeted that the accusations were "beyond ridiculous". I think Tesla company policy, with it's shareholder values in mind, will have no choice but to adopt natural flake graphite (if they aren't already), so they would certainly be looking for a supplier to meet their needs as the gigafactory comes online ahead of schedule.
TON are history for so many reasons, KNL are boutique and without the competitive advantages our PhD CEO has given our graphite through novel processing methods, MOZ and BKT are too late to the prom and other companies aren't even worth mentioning for various reasons. If I was a battery producer and especially Tesla, I would struggle to find a better option than MNS.
Just need that finance!!!.... but a western off-take will go along way to achieving this!
UglyKiwi.... I'm no expert with the tea leaves but thought that if a 7th generation fortune teller such as yourself was to read yellow leaves such as those from a chamomile tea, perhaps we could gain some premonition as to when we will split from our yellow cake assets
Anyway, doesn't look like santa will deliver $1 before xmass.... but no doubt the SP will be their pre-production, and if we gain a decent western off-take, it will almost happen overnight
MNS Price at posting:
37.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)