Well that depends heavily on your definition of "better". Due to PLL's leverage from Atlantic and SYA offtakes its probably the most leveraged to the upside near production or in production company around. If however the lithium price falls, PLL gets hammered. There will be pre-production explorers with more upside leverage because their projects are also being priced as if they are viable only in an unlikely state of the world.
If lithium prices start to recover (or even spike), PLL share price should be taking off like a rocket ship. If PLL were to see even one year at US$3,000/t then in simple terms it makes US$2,100/t on its 113kt offtake or US$237m (AU$339m) for that year. With 19.4m shares at US$9.28 the MC is US$180m. So if US$3,000/t prices were to re-emerge then PLL's on a future pre tax PE of under 1.0x from the NAL offtake alone. The markets pricing of PLL implies either lithium prices will stay low indefinitely (or at least stay low until the offtake disappears due to C&M of SYA).
If you park the value of the offtake, the 2021 DFS for Carolina has 242ktpa of SC6 production with a strip ratio of 11.6:1 and presumably due to the byproduct credits a cash cost of US$234t/t (the figure is rather low). The mining and concentrator capex was US$243m but this excludes project indirects, owners costs and contingency. Its a high capex, low operating cost proposal. The LRS MC is $518m (US$347m @ 0.67). That's 93% higher than PLL's MC so to get like-for-like bang for my investment dollar I need to "upgrade" the Carolina project to 467kt pa of SC6 (or 28ktpa of Li2O equivalents).
Clearly one of the projects you consider "better" is LRS and its a good project (on paper). It plans to produce 405kt of SC5.5 (22.3kt Li2O) and 123kt of SC3.0 (3.7kt Li2O). So its producing 26kt of Li2O which is nearly the same as PLL after adjusting for the differential current MC's to get to a pre-funded project equivalent. LRS has a modestly higher strip ratio at 17.6:1 and a modestly higher cash cost at US$328/t. Phase one capex at US$253m is less than PLL's scale adjusted US$469m ($243m * 1.93).
So ignoring the NAL offtake and any value from Atlantic Carolina's in the same ball-park as LRS once you factor in LRS has a higher MC currently. Carolina is relatively higher capex but slightly lower opex with a similar MC adjusted output volume.
Atlantic does deserve more of a mention. The agreement is that Piedmont funds the first US$75m of capex (the earlier phase has been fully funded). After that it shares capital costs equally with Atlantic and receives the same ownership percentage as Atlantic. This means while Atlantic has minimal cash (as it currently does), PLL's value in Ewoyaa is closely estimated by taking Atlantic's MC less US$75m. Atlantic has 650m shares on issue at A$0.365 for an A$237m MC (US$159m @ 0.67). Take off $75m and PLL's value is US$84m. At Atlantic's current price, PLL's Ewoyaa interest is US4.3c of value or A6.5c.
I could start taking Atlantic and NAL valuations off PLL's MC and then compare the residual MC of PLL with other projects but it quickly becomes silly.
PLL Price at posting:
14.0¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
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