I hope there is a way they could work it out together as well....

I hope there is a way they could work it out together as well. Woodford's analysis makes it seem like a pretty binary choice though. Perhaps there is a third cooperative option but I'm not sure what it would look like.

I think the tricky thing for A2M is that allowing Bright to increase it's holding would effectively be allowing it to partially take over the company (i.e. more than 50% of voting rights). All long it seems they have been most concerned in preventing precisely that outcome (i.e. preventing a takeover of their supply chain). I'm not sure if there would be any circumstance in which they would contemplate letting Bright go back past 50% as it was prior to Synlait's IPO. At that time Synlait was nowhere near as strategically important to A2M as it is now.