Good News & Bad News, page-45945

Thanks for putting up that interview with that guy from Albemarle, Eric Norris
notice that he made mention of the fact that hardly any companies were profitable at these prices and the situation was probably going to go on for some time....
So they are trying to preserve their balance sheet...
He said ALB seemed to be making money on spod but not on chemical processing ie that is value adding via lithium hydroxide processing
So they are basically laying off workers at there chemical processing plant in Kermoten in WA and shutting it down and then transporting spod to china where it can be done much cheaper.
My understanding is that Pilgangoora might have one one of these expensive lithium hydroxide processing plants too.
in '23 we had $3.3bn in cash and this year we have $1.6bn left and of that $810 bn was cap ex.
Just wondering how much of that cap ex was spent on our lithium hydroxide factory and whether we should be spending any money at all on turning spod into hydroxide when the Chinese can do it so much better than us anyway.
It could be millions of dollars down the toilet when that money could be being used to preserve our balance sheet??