Banter and general comments, page-17689

What a strange read that Macquarie research report is. It's almost as if they have chucked their most junior analyst at it and said do an upgrade. The upgrade was then not peer reviewed and has now been published. Three issues are noted below, but there are more.

Revenue forecasts
Anyone following Core properly knows they have a first DSO shipment that is loading now. Its 15kt and sold at US$951. Shipment is scheduled for Q4 and we know trucks are now filling the order. It should be the December 2022 quarter, but even if it misses that, it will sail in the March 2023 quarter. This is US$14.3m of revenue that will happen this financial year. What is Macquarie's forecast for July22 to June23? $0 of revenue. This is just silly, have they not even realised DSO shipping is happening. How closely are they following what Core is doing?

Not only do they not have this DSO shipment but they effectively say that Core will not sell any product from site for the entire 2023 calendar year and its only approx. Jan 2024 that core will start generating revenue creating a half year of sales in FY24e. Even if Core had a major commissioning issue with their DMS (which I don't expect), they would DSO ship during 2023. If Core were to ship 750Kt of DSO @ US951/t would be about $1b in revenue. DMS commissioning issues will not stop material revenue in Jan-June 2023 or July-Dec 2023.


Let's look at their AISC analysis
I'm struggling to even understand how they come up with this rubbish. Issue #1, is that all the exploration expenditure does not result in any production upgrade. 180kt/yr is still being used by 2028. Issue #2, where do they get their AISC costs from? Core had estimated AISC at US$441/t in July 2021. There's been a bit of inflation in Australia so something between US$441 and US$500/t may now be applicable. Macquarie are saying that in 2025 AISC will be US$1,325/t. What is there evidence that Core will be running costs about 300% higher than modelled?
Why do they think Core will remain circa double or more modelled costs over the next five years?



Comparable Companies
Look at their comparable companies list. The only comparable features is total market cap and that they are miners. These names never appear in HC as comparable companies being discussed. The reason is that they are not the peers against whom Core will measure themselves. Its a good argument whether peer's are the mining lithium companies or some big pre-production lithium companies. But this set of names. Give me a break.