Its Over, page-22839

....did the Lion misjudged the whole lithium equation, now acknowledging that China represents 80% of global demand.

....any company would sell to whomever who wishes to buy at a price both parties can mutually agree on. Tesla also bought from Yahua. There is nothing that astute about supplying to just the US. PLS does not believe in such fixated view and they have been more successful.
Liontown stops holding out on sending lithium to China
Brad ThompsonReporter
Jul 15, 2024 – 4.24pm


Liontown Resources will sell lithium to a Chinese customer for the first time, ending the company’s hardline stance on only doing offtake deals with Western partners.

Tony Ottaviano-led Liontown said on Monday that it has inked a short-term supply deal with Sinomine in a departure from a long-held policy of keeping Chinese lithium buyers at arm’s length.
Sinomine, listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, is one of the big Chinese critical minerals players expanding its lithium footprint in Africa and also controls a lithium mine in Canada.

The deal covers 100,000 tonnes of spodumene over 10 months as Liontown ramps up the processing plant at its flagship Kathleen Valley lithium mine in Western Australia.

It supersedes a Liontown plan to sell tonnes on the spot market. Those tonnes would likely have ended up in China anyway, given China’s dominance in refining lithium into battery chemicals.


Liontown is hoping to achieve a higher premium through the Sinomine deal where pricing will be determined based on a formula linked to the battery-grade lithium carbonate market.

The sales will help Liontown through a period when Kathleen Valley is expected to operate at a loss. Those expectations are based on high production costs in the ramp-up phase and prevailing low lithium prices.

The offtake agreement with Sinomine comes on top of long-term contracts to supply Elon Musk’s Tesla, South Korea’s LG Energy Solution and US car maker Ford.

Liontown said it would start supplying those long-term customers progressively over the next 12 months as it stepped up production at Kathleen Valley.

Tesla is poised to take supply from early in 2025 and LG as soon as possible, depending on the grade and quality of spodumene coming out of the Kathleen Valley plant.

In unveiling a beefed up offtake agreement and financing deal with LG on July 2, Mr Ottaviano admitted Liontown was finding it hard to ignore buyer interest from China.

Speaking to The Australian Financial Review, he said China represented 80 per cent of global demand.

“We can’t ignore it completely. The direction we want to take is to be an ex-China supplier of lithium, but we won’t ignore the biggest market in the world,” he said at the time.

The Gina Rinehart-backed Liontown is committed to being compliant with the US Inflation Reduction Act so that carmakers like Tesla and Ford and major battery maker LG qualify for subsidies.

Even so, the short-duration of the Sinomine transaction preserves Liontown’s aversion to doing long-term offtake deals with Chinese entities, just as it has tried to avoid links to Chinese price indices.

Sinomine paid $US180 million ($265 million) for the Bikita lithium mine in Zimbabwe in 2022 and then invested $US200 million in building processing plants at the site. It is a big backer of ASX-listed Tyranna Resources, which has lithium projects in Angola.
Sinomine also sources lithium from the Tanco mine it owns in Canada.

LG and Liontown are evaluating building a refinery that would qualify for green metals incentives available under the Biden administration’s signature green bill. They are yet to specify where.