KAI - Gold or Lithium play?, page-20

Hi @Botellovich

In 2016 KAI did some aerial magnetics work and it showed up potential lithium targets all over Mount York. They went looking for wide, exposed pegmatites on the surface similar to PLS, but only found small, narrow outcrops. However, they did find gold at Mount York and that became a focus from 2017 onwards.

In 2017 Eric Sprott provided AUD5M for Kairos to look for gold nuggets at Croydon. These were found and another focal point occurred at Croydon. Through 2018 lithium prices fell and the company's appetite for lithium exploration waned. The company's focus centred on gold. During 2019 and 2020 after the intrusive gold discovery was made at Hemi by De Grey, the company realised that swathes of their tenements had a similar geological setting to Hemi. That signaled the start of work to discover a similar resource to Hemi.

As lithium prices recovered and subsequently sky rocketed, Kairos then decided to start looking for lithium again and they obtain exploration licenses for tenements such as Lalla Rookh.

While all of this was going on, the resource estimate for Mount York was grown to 850,000 oz. This is my best guess/opinion only, but I believe that at the end of 2021 a bunch of cashed up shareholders decided to become activist and take over the board. They saw a reasonably large lump of gold at Mount York and decided it was to time to develop it.

The new board made Mount York number one priority and dedicated funds to a concentrated drilling program there. This included, for the first time, core drilling to start gathering data to allow a feasibility study to commence.

Serendipity struck earlier this year when they were doing some civil work at Mount York and a bulldozer brought up some spodumene bearing pegmatites just below the surface at lucky sump. The rock chips from these samples returned LI concentrations up to 1.9%. So the penny dropped - there were exposed pegmatites at what are now the PLS pits, but extending from these pits the pegmatites become covered. The question then becomes whether this means that there might be pegmatites under shallow cover at Mount York similar to what was found at Lucky Sump. Time will tell.

Now following on from that, we're getting areas of interest for lithium and gold at Croydon. Once again, time will tell.

A number of other posters have previously noted that if KAI had remained focused on lithium in 2018, we may have been in different position today, and that's point that can be made. But it's worth noting that the exploration work at Roe Hills also ceased from about 2017 through to 2020. This was after there were some respectable gold hits around Lingering Kiss. So your comment about what happened to lithium exploration and why wasn't Mount York followed through, would hit some resonance with a number of long term holders here. The company's perspective was that lithium had gone cold and companies like Altura went to the wall, but gold nuggets and hemi style gold had become hot, so that's where they turned.

What I have noticed with the new board is that things seem to be happening. There are definitely more hands available to speed things along. The volume of news flow is encouraging. Now, along with other holders, we're just waiting for some solid, positive news - maybe a large jump in the resource estimate at Mount York, Lucky Sump and/or Zakanaka have substantial lithium reserves, lithium occurs at Iron Stirrup, Aqua turns up something like Hemi, or they hit lithium on Eastern Targets. As I've said before, time will tell.

All of the above are just my opinions and please DYOR.

GLTAH.