I would not be surprised if the joint venture company builds a...

I would not be surprised if the joint venture company builds a downstream conversion facility in Southern Mali - since it is the closest geographically to the Coast (same trucking and ports for the spod to China).

In the very early days of BGS, there was some conjecture of this very possibility, but I think that subsided when we bought GF into the project and they subsequently started to build their own facility in China. So my conjecture is that; Mali will be ok with the status quo set up re the spod plant in Goulamina and stage One going to Ganfeng's plant in China - however, Mali will probably look very favorably on a secondary processioning facility in Country...which would be consistent with the Mali/Burkina Faso/Niger stance on secondary processing...

I posted some time ago that we could actually develop a Lithium processing hub for all of the countries in the region with Li resources - as part of a new joint venture company including us and GF which is in our agreement with GF too...broadly. Yes, we would then have to likely import a lot of chemical/s into Mali for the facility, but we will have a large capacity available returning from the ports that we send our spod through (to China Ganfeng).

All IMO

Sentiment = extreme BUY