I wasn't talking about the longer term lithium fundamentals, I...

I wasn't talking about the longer term lithium fundamentals, I was referring specifically to the pricing in that auction. You cut off the first sentence where I said "That auction was only on a very small amount of uncontracted volume, and combine that with big demand and you get some wild pricing." Those are the kind of circumstances can lead to pricing outside the market fundamentals.

Imagine if I had a little hotdog stand, I sold most of them out during the day to the regular customers and had 1 left. Then at the end of the day 10 very hungry people came up and started bidding over it. That hotdog is going to get a very high price on it, way beyond usual. If the following day I cut my regular contracts and put aside 10 hotdogs for the end of day hungry bidders, I'm not going to get the same price as I did previously am I. Nothing to do with the future fundamentals, which of course I think are very strong, I'm just not as quick as others to declare this the new "official baseline lithium price" given the circumstances that occurred around that pricing. Nor do I think that changing to entirely spot pricing will mean we get that price for all our lithium. That's all.

To speak about the long term though, with a commodity as common as lithium the price is never just going to shoot off into the stratosphere forever, there is just way too many crappy, uneconomical lithium deposits that will start to come into play. Just look at those clay deposits, they're huge. At some point those will start coming online. Even the lithium in seawater might become a thing. I have a theory that the cost of seawater lithium might be the ultimate price cap, since that resource is so freely available and practically unlimited. It won't be cheap, but if demand is high enough they'll buy it. Meanwhile we'll be laughing with production costs a fraction of the size. The big money is always made with the low-cost producers with giant deposits that can just keep scaling up and up. And I think Allkem will be one. I don't even have to think it, we already are.


And as for SDV, I repeat my comment: "I suspect that as parts of Olaroz Stage 2 get completed they'll move construction teams over to SDV. Given the continued pandemic craziness and global shipping and logistics issues, I think that's the best we're realistically going to get." There's a lot of crazy stuff going on in the world right now, and if there isn't a trained workforce available and no suppliers with available production or ships available to carry goods then having a pile of cash won't help things get moving. We also don't really know how far advanced SDV really was in terms of their actual "boots on the ground" final construction plans, and whether ORE wants to change any of those plans to fit their own construction methods. We need more information to answer these questions, this is definitely something to ask the company.

We haven't even had our first quarterly as a merged entity yet.

I know that the Galaxy crowd are coming from years of SDV being the big company defining project and are desperate to get it moving, but we're not a "1 big project" company anymore. Between Mt Cattlin, Naraha and Olaroz Stage 1 and 2 there's is plenty of lithium on the way. With current lithium pricing we're undervalued on those projects alone. SDV is just one piece in a much larger long-term portfolio, along with James Bay, Olaroz Stage 3, Naraha Stage 2 and the massive Cauchari resource. I hope we get some answers on it soon too, but keep some perspective, you're part of something bigger now.