Ok, I'm probably going to segment these up, and post the details in post sections as they are still fresh in my mind:
1. Brief informal chat took place while we got coffee 10 minutes or so before open. Joe Lowry was speaking with some holders. From HC Forum, Hobbystock and myself in attendance, not sure if there were others. Wandered over there to listen to his wisdom. He has always been excited by the home-based power, I wanted to ask about Aqueon/Redflow but never got the chance there, India was mentioned and his eyes lit up..
2. Anthony Tse in James Bond outfit, very dapper, very formal to begin with.
I can see why Thesi is smitten with him.
3. Meeting called to order, 3 resolutions (1 was removed) were put through for approval (I will list them later).
4. Excellent presentation by Tse as usual, with the merger involved, he was interrupted briefly by Rowley to make a point about the merger. Essentially a GMM / GXY merger and history was required, to save the company which at one point had a market cap of 20M, and now sits around 571M and is estimated to soon be 720-800M market cap when re-merged.
I will paraphrase the questions to the directors here, and summarise. Note that none of this is necessarily gospel:
Q: Will a battery technology come along, and displace Lithium overnight?
A: We don't forsee that happening, even if it were to occur, for 15+ years. Lead-acid batteries were put out there as an example. Plant production is all geared around Lithium at present and the re-tooling etc. involved would not be trivial.
Q: With Sal de Vida, will a JV still be required? And at what percentage?
A Tse: With the cash-flow generated by Cattlin, a JV will not be required, as they have other finance methods (eg. loan to be paid back over say 3 years). There will be no need to give away on-going value over many years with this approach.
Follow-up Q: POSCO are apparently building a pilot brine plant in Argentina and have a direct-extraction technology that can retrieve 80% Lithium, has this been considered for SdV.
A: Tse/Whitfield?: We've spoken with POSCO before. We will however be taking a traditional evaporation pond approach to SdV, as the technology is proven and understood. We do keep an eye on emerging Lithium brine technologies like DET.
Guerrero?: POSCO mentioned the DET process works better at 2% Lithium concentration anyway rather than the lower concentrations POSCO were using, which is what our ponds achieve.
Q: What is the time-frame for SdV build?
A Tse: Pilot plant (module) of 12,000tpa by 2017? (ed: probably late in 2017) Commercial production plant by 2018 20,000-25,000tpa of LCE. The pilot plant will give us the chance to perfect the process and train staff. This is where ORE had so many issues as they skipped the pilot phase and have never been able to operate plant to full purity / capacity etc.
Q: Will there be share consolidation?
A Rowley: Yes, we recognise there are too many shares on issue.
(The reason behind this, is the share price needs to move to $1 before many international institutions can invest in GXY. Other reasoning is to consolidate before listing on HKSE). At one point $3AUD a share was a figure dropped by Rowley, but hard to know in what context.
Q: What is the strategy / timeframe for paying a dividend? (Large shareholder asks)
A: When the company has proven cash-flows once again. (ed: 2-3 years of proper production most likely)
Notes:
During the presentation Tse mentioned that people ask: can we keep growing at this rate (share price etc.). His response is "this is just the base..."
Anthony stressed that we are the only independent supplier of Spodumene around to the Chinese producers. We are also the only pure Lithium play for institutional investors. 50 Australian companies out there, now claim to have something to do with Lithium...
Joe was excited about GXY and feels this is a great place to be invested right now. He is also very interested in India which is making moves to also move towards EVs and potentially grid-storage type solutions.
Charles W. had a very good discussion with me around GXY's history Jiangsu plant which he was directly involved with and spoke about the SdV plant being modular in design from pilot to production. They also have a big advantage with this plant as it is not continuous from end-to-end so they can shutdown part of the plant for maintenance or fine-tuning, they could never really do this with Jiangsu.
