General discussion, page-5071

Niobium is a specialist commodity that requires a dedicated focus to develop. Complicated mets and processing facility. They did the easy part of defining a reasonable resource (nothing like ours re scale or high grade portion though) and did a feasibility study. But it was never their main focus, so they had no niobium experts on board anywhere in the company, nor did they do the mets required to take it forward. Given the other REEs they had that were a bigger priority, it was always going to need commercialisation of those to go very well to double back and invest in the Niobium development (which was a lot of capex for an entirely different facility needed plus experts in niobium required). As we know, the story has not gone well for lynas since, which meant there was zero chance they could tell the market they were going to have a crack at making niobium work. They probably should have sold it along the way, but it was so unknown as a commodity back then plus they probably thought it was a huge ace up their sleeve for later. Now though, its stranded as we have something way bigger, higher grade, more profitable and with a dedicated focus on niobium (like cbmm). Means they have nowhere to go with it.