The James Bay points you raise does imply some shockingly bad management from AKE. It’s really unforgivable for them not to have had someone with authority and responsibility to rapidly address all outstanding permitting points. The only other reasonable explanation was that they were expecting the Spod price to tank, and the urgency wasn’t there. If the latter is the case they haven’t been transparent at all about this and that is also shockingly bad management. Either way it’s not good.
Whilst it’s true that AKE dropped the ball in WA, they are far from the only ones. PLS is the prime example here of missing the discovery boat in WA. Despite some people’s claims that PLS has enough spod, they had the cash and the recently discovered large deposits were literally in their own backyard. They could have bought them at early exploration stage in 2022 for peanuts and created massive shareholder value. They failed too.
I personally believe that the post merger plan always has been to sell Mt Cattlin after the merger. If Spod prices stay low its too small of an operation to make a huge difference to the bottom line. Divesting from Australian operations also explains why AKE didn’t try to outbid MinRes for Bald Hill, who got it for a steal.
It’s unfair to say that Livent doesn’t have an active pipeline of projects. They have ~100 ktpa of brine expansion in the works for Hombre Meurto. People love to criticise their ”slow progress”, but no other company has really been able to capitalise on the lithium boom either. The ones that have made serous coin still need to invest in meaningful downstream operations because if lithium prices stay low as it’s the non-integrated spod producers that will get hammered the most. Unlike Livent, the non integrated Aussie producers have zero track record of downstream lithium chemical processing to rely on to make hydroxide. It’s highly questionable if they can even do it at all. This is a salient point that should not be forgotten in any comparisons of progress.
AKE Price at posting:
$9.16 Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
