Banter and general comments, page-16440

There were three interesting features to this proposed deal. The first is Hydroxide but there's been enough noted already and nothing solid since to work with.

The second is this is a strangely small deal for Tesla at under 30kt/yr - but this was about the largest deal that Core could commit to given existing reserves / resources and planned capacity. I wonder whether part of the reason behind the delay in finalising the deal is that Core plans to concurrently announce a resource upgrade, a capacity expansion and a materially larger deal with Tesla. This would @#$@ off Ganfeng and is perhaps why they sold out. Are we on the cusp of expanding to something around 350ktpa and sign a deal that increases in a few years to circa 200ktpa off-take with Tesla?

The third interesting feature of the deal was that it was subject to a price floor and ceiling. Price floors are nice to have but can create odd outcomes if the price moves a lot from where it was expected to be when signing (just ask SYA/PLL shareholders about those risks on the 500/900 floor ceiling deal, but that's a different discussion). Again I don't have the inside knowledge on this, but it would make sense that Tesla was pushing extremely hard around the discount they would get in pricing due to the existence of the floor. Core may well have then basically decided to short-circuit those discussions, raise $100m and say to Telsa - ok we can now wave the floor-ceiling structure. Did that happen? I've got no idea but if a deal is announced that doesn't have a floor and ceiling structure then this is what is likely to have happened.

From the original release: