Paterson's should stay out of the research business if this latest on GPX is the best they can produce. Comparing SYR to GPX is about as informed as concluding "SYR's business model has collapsed, and they were selling a carbon product, so dump your coal investments." The only similarity between SYR and GPX is that the resource each is mining falls under the very broad umbrella of "graphite". The Patersons research also missed the little piece of recent news about the +70% upgrade in GPX resource and mine life, instead using years-old data from the original PFS. So I'd recommend quietly filing the Patersons research in the bin.
I think we all felt that graphite for batteries was the hot new resource space to be in back in 2014-2015, thanks to the copious amounts of graphite information and disinformation that was flowing around the ASX at that time, that enabled companies like SYR and MNS to dupe the market into absurd valuations. And to be fair, battery graphite was what Phil Hoskins was trying to sell to China back then as well, as was everyone, because China - the worlds' biggest consumer of graphite - had announced they were scaling back their domestic graphite ops for environmental reasons.
The fact that GPX shareholders are about to have the ride of their life is more ass than class. Pure luck actually. Phil Hoskins tells the story of the most important meeting in the history of GPX, during his "100 Days in China" when the Chinese CEO he had just met with mumbled in Chinese as he left the room "when are these Australians going to learn that we don't want battery graphite, we need expandable graphite." Phil asked his interpreter what the guy said, and when he found out, asked the CEO to come back in and tell him about expandable graphite. Phil sent a sample of Chilalo graphite to this company to test for expandability, and they were blown away - 1,500x or 6 times more expandable than anything they had ever seen. And the reason ours is so different? Because Chilalo is the closest deposit to the volcano - "hot ground" as the geos called it. Struggling MNS tried to do a 'me too' and have their graphite tested for expandability - as did a few other battery hopefuls - but MNS only came up to about 500x, as Chilalo sits between MNS and the volcano. WKT gave it a go too and may have got around 560x from memory.
So GPX was No1, and China wanted it - all of it, 2 million tonnes a year of it, and that's just for the flame retardant building materials they needed domestically for new legislation to improve the fire ratings of Chinese buildings.
This marked the turning point for GPX, when GPX broke from the battery graphite pack and went on what many thought was a wild goose chase. Expandable graphite?? WTF?? And as we have since learnt, expandable is a totally different commodity to the fine stuff SYR has been trying to flood the world market with, in terms of all the different high-end applications that expandable can be used for.
Go you good thing! How good is expandable graphite?
MVL Price at posting:
20.0¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
