ASX Today, page-36957

On the last week's PLS quarterly investor call, they disclosed they bought $73m shares, but didn't say which company they invested.
Deep pockets

Ellison said discussions with Chinese giant Gangfeng and Albemarle revealed shrinking inventories – a precondition to prices bottoming – and MinRes would follow the traditional big commodity producers’ playbook of “land-banking” quality tenements while the market searched for a bottom.

Pilbara’s Henderson said he expected more mines and projects to fold if prices remain low, and Pilbara would look to snap them up, just as it picked up Altura during the 2019-20 price slump.
Average investors might think if it’s good enough for them, then why not? But they don’t have the deep pockets of these players – Pilbara is sitting on $2.1 billion of cash from the years of plenty – nor the “networks” or industry instincts. So they have to satisfy themselves on fundamentals, and the fundamentals for the metal have a number of moving parts.
Electrification of transport, obviously, still has a long way to run. Benchmark expects global sales of electric vehicles to quadruple over the decade to 2033 – to 59.1 million from 13.8 million in 2023 – and lithium demand to increase fivefold over the same period to more than 5 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent. (The difference in growth rates reflects the fact that EV makers are the dominant buyers of lithium-ion batteries, but not the only buyers.)