General Discussion AGY, page-23190

I can't add much to the conversation above, except that the burden of proof lies with the claimant.

I wonder if we could play catchball with an idea here:

"Is AGY slowing their ramping efforts due to the low(er) price of Lithium?"

My perspective is no, I see too many negatives against it. However, I have my biases, so maybe we can construct something that holds water.

From a bean counter's view, I can see why this might be an attractive strategy. Ramping up anything has greater costs than maintaining an achieved level. If they've done the calculus, and they can afford to tick over without risk of going broke, it might make sense to hang out until lithium's off to the races. That way, they can be up and away with the rising tide, and they don't have to dig deep into their pockets to grow and maintain capabilities. At the same time, everything seemed like it was just outside of reach... Offtakes, permits, production... It all felt like it was all happening as the price was high.

I can think of a near endless list of reasons why it's a bad idea... Not knowing if you can produce at nameplate is a huge risk, so perhaps the key one. The other being, commodity prices were great while things started to slow to a crawl.

Bit of column A, bit of column B?

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of facts either way. Only that we saw a similar pattern during 'the lean years' (as Jerko called them) before the last Li run, AGY seemed to be asleep, and suddenly woke up when Li went for a climb. There is a chicken and egg problem here, too.

Anyway, hopefully we can collectly learn something through thesis-antithesis-synthesis... After all, it's not battery-grade lithium I'm making in these comments.

Curious to hear people's thoughts.