Banter and General Comments, page-7104

As I recall, one of our customers is finished this month, and I think the other is meant to be finished next month. There are more customers than these two, but I can only recall the two big ones. Not sure what the others are doing.

The stupid bit of this, though, is that it was one of our HC posters that originally alerted us to what was happening with the customer converters, (because he read the Chinese news reports and press releases) and only after that did we find out officially from the company. It's one of the reasons why people got frustrated with management. A whole world of stress and damage could have been avoided if they had said this was going to be happening when they knew - which was probably some time last year. Clearly the shorters knew - because that is how the whole "over supply" of battery spod nonsense started up again. There were other causes initially - the MS projections of oversupply sometime in the next century, SQM announcing they were going to cover Chile in evaporation ponds, then the DSO idiocy from MIN, then the Chines low grade lithium mines going into overdrive delivery technical grade, ORE also delivering muchly technical grade and pretending that the demand for everything was driving prices down (when in fact it was their tech grade crap that was going down) - all into a market that can't use much technical grade. The battery stuff - which is GXY- was relatively immune, until the converters realised they couldn't supply enough battery grade for the demand and started shutting down to upgrade, update and increase capacity. Hopefully the cathode/anode makers have their act together or we will have another round of this rubbish - meanwhile the car makers still can't get enough batteries.

Investing in gold, iron and health stocks is so much simpler. Lithium is a bit like investing in agriculture - so many moving parts.