Banter and general comments, page-4537

this life cycle of a junior explorer chart gets blindly rolled out as a Bible as if all junior miners and mining cycles were the same. maybe there's some truth but for us:
1. we have under one year from breaking ground to production. many mines face four or five years - two years for project finance Inc feasibility PLUS building mine PLUS building out and getting consent for support infra or negotiating third party access PLUS construction period. with ganfeng equity finance PLUS simple build we have stripped out two years on a normal timeline
2. our construction is simple - dig a pit and build a DMS plant. for most mines you have mine PLUS plant PLUS billions for rail and maybe even a port PLUS workers camp PLUS captive power PLUS rolling stock
3. our operation risk is lower - SB makes the DMS plant sound like sifting flour to bake a cake ie simple so I can understand. we are not building twiggys anaconda nickel plant that took ten years of operation to get right...
4. we are already well into the orphan period (feasibility, fid and finance done)
5. typical mine builds in a boom and produces in a down turn. while I don't completely believe this perpetual deficit argument for li we should be pretty safe on pricing in 2022 and maybe even when we come out of our offtakes in five years.
6. in the past a lot of funds couldnt take construction risk and so could only invest in operating assets which gave a good lift on hitting production. I'm not sure this is the case anymore particularly given lower construction risk and given operating raw battery material miners are so expensive.

so all in all not saying sp won't come back off a bit and not underestimating the construction risks given covid PLUS worker shortage PLUS wet season but over to SB to deliver on this. Mainly i query how much this junior explorer chart really applies to us.