Stephan, for you to say "I don't think the share price...

Stephan, for you to say "I don't think the share price development would have been materially different without the merger." is damning the merger with faint praise. I remember Joe Lowry commenting before the merger decision that he feared the joining of Livent and Allkem could be represented as

1 + 1 = 1.75

In other words he envisaged the merger adding less than nothing for shareholders. He thought the management teams at both Allkem and Livent were rubbish and putting Livent's management team in charge of the merged entity would simply mean more of the same. As it has turned out, currently the calculation is more like

1 + 1 = 0.75

as in the merged entity actually has less stock market presence than either of Allkem and Livent when they were separate entities.

When you see brokers putting out analysis that Arcadium is trading at a 50% discount to fair value that is not because the lithium market is crap - calculating fair value factors in the crap lithium market - but rather it is because they do not trust Arcadium management to deliver on the full opportunities that they see in the company.

With Pall the Plod Graves doing what good portfolio managers do - in contrast to what good business managers do - by pulling the hand brakes on all of Arcadium's projects he is clearly waiting for beta - a sector recovery - to get the Arcadium stock price out of its current slump. Graves has as good as turned Arcadium into an index fund for lithium.