General Discussion IG6, page-273

The Money of Mine lads spoke to battery metals analyst, Matt Fernley, in last night's edition of their poddie. Despite him pretty much having a swing and a miss with his lithium price predictions for last year I think he is a really good source of info and analysis on battery materials stuff. As he said early in the interview even good analysts get it right only maybe 60% of the time but just as important is that they learn from their mistakes.

From about the 50:30 minute mark Matt talks about graphite. I reckon he is on the money about ex-China graphite: the only way to get ex-China downstream graphite production up and running is with government incentives and support. If there is that government committent then private equity will begin to flow in. The reason that that government intervention is critical is that the Chinese totally dominant graphite production and it would be a fatal mistake by the west to remain totally reliant on the Chinese (I might have read into Matt's comments some of my own views but I think that was the general indication Matt was giving).

Here is the link: https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=zcySYyJUQFc&t=19s (remove the space between "you" and "tube")

I think that is exactly the position that International Graphite is in. They need to source about $20m to get to the next step of going downstream, then they will also need another $200m or so next year to go the full hog. Very difficult for a tiddler with a market cap of around $10m to do that on the open capital markets so government just have to fill the gaps.