Here's how I sleep at night.
- Lithium price in NEVER going to retrace back to its low days. Demand and cost curves just won't allow it.
- Spodumene is great but going forward from here there will be no small operations. They will be gobbled up if suitable or left to die. Mainly because processing needs large amounts of consistent product. We're talking +100MT spod resources.
- Lepidolite was a joke at high Lithium prices. It won't survive price cycles and its waste is just not acceptab;e top Green supply chain envagalists e.g VW, Ford, GM etc. 99.6% WASTE that has no stream so just gets dumped.
- Brine is still the cheapest (excepot GB under certain circumstances)
- Processing is HARD, with few experienced teams around and while we will have enough raw materials come the end of the decade processing plants will be lagging.
As I've said before the average to get an operations up and running is ten years which our proposed 12k tpa time still comes in ahead. While I think JZ and team has faffed about at times due to inexperience the Puina team on the otherhand really gets sheet done. So if they are given the permits and capital its full steam ahead.
I'm confident we'll get our permits and funding in due course, these things are NEVER fast or ahead of schedule but it will happen - there is demand for the cheapest conversion cost product not going away for over a decade. The customers want it, the gov wants it, the people want it and the investors want it so it will happen.
Accordingly if we take a conservative approach so $20k per tonne profit that gives us $20,000 x 12,000 = $240M earnings and with a conservative PE ratio a share price of 10 x 240,000,000 / 1,400,000,000 = $1.71 WAY CONSERVATIVE.
I've also said I don't see NPV's as much value other than for a payback scenario on a build investment. As running investment scenario the sp is an auction so to speak that gets adjusted by the present real time performance. Nothing about sunk capital.
So the remaining frustration is really timing, everybody wants to make money sooner rather than later but hey sometimes things worth waiting for take time especially if one thinks about impatience and money left on the table.
