One thing about these emerging companies is that they will always present their results in the best possible light. WA1 is no exception and yesterday's announcement was designed such that one shortcoming was presented but in such a way to draw our attention away from it. I'm not saying yesterday's announcement wasn't good news. It most certainly is. But there are 2 percentages presented in the flow chart below that may confuse the average punter (gambler) who is not making the effort to get their head around this stuff. The first percentage is how much of the niobium that is contained in the raw ore is extracted in processing. The second percentage is how pure is the processed product.
WA after the first stage extracted 53% of the niobium contained in the raw ore. You can see by the question marks I put on the flow chart below that WA1 has NOT included what percentage of Niobium the other companies are extracting after the first stage of beneficiation BUT and this is a huge but in the final box on the right hand side we are told that the others have a recovery of between 30 and 70%. This means that someone after 3 stages of processing has recovered 70% of the contained niobium. We are not told who.
There are 2 elements of good news for WA1 though. For all intents and purposes no further niobium was lost in this second process with 99.9% recovery. The other point is that the WA1 purity after stage 2 is way superior to any other company with 67% niobium and only 33% other impurities. The other point in this chart that gives some more potential upside is in the first stage for WA1 they indicate that this stage is UNoptimized so maybe more niobium will yet be extracted when WA1 revisits this first stage.
As someone pointed out yesterday the final recovery will be stage 1% x stage 2% x stage 3%. At this point we are still at 53% thanks to the excellent recovery of stage 2. Stage 3 is still an unknown and stage 1 may yet improve. I reckon a significant improvement on WA1's stage 1 extraction will see this thing skyrocket.
On thing we can take away from all this is that this whole process in pretty complicated. No doubt this accounts for the long lag time we have had since the last news but I have no doubt the team has worked as fast as they can to get us thus far. More patience may be required by us.
(20min delay)