My understanding is the ceiling only applies for 2 out of the 4 years of offtake with Yahua per 1/4/19 announcement, and based on the Ganfeng offtake announcement 9/8/21, it has a floor but no mention of ceiling. Both provide for pricing that is referenced/linked to price of 6% spodumene concentrate. These two offtakes represent around 80% of total production for 4 years, presumably after that they would be renegotiated or other offtakers/customers found.

The author of the article you linked to states "The short mine life (7 or 8 years)", and seems way off. LOM as other HC posters have suggested is probably more like 16 years now since the 6/3/23 BP33 MRE announcement.

So it's only for 40% of production for 2 years out of possible 16yr LOM. Looking at it another way it is 5% of LOM production being sold at the ceiling price and based on that I don't believe it is as big a deal as some commentators make out.

At the risk of stating the obvious, in the short/medium term, it seems more likely that apart from resource and/or production expansion etc type announcements, CXO and most other lithium companies' valuations recovering is going to be based on where the spodumene price heads from here,