Sorry if I missed it in earlier comments but there are 267.6m shares on issue. This means the voting split was:
- 151.2m shares where the shareholder didn't respond and vote
- 52.3m shares owned by MIN and presumably they all voted no
- 36.6m shares that voted yes
- 27.3m The remaining no vote from non-MIN sharesholders
- 0.2m shares that voted with an abstain vote
The bulk of the HC posters are likely to have sold to MIN's 52.3m shareholding or be in the 36.6m and 27.3m groups because they are engaged with their shareholdings and more likely to vote. I don't recall seeing HC posters with ESS shares saying, nah I'm not going to bother voting. This large block of 151.2m that didn't engage with the takeover offer via the scheme of arrangement may become very important. If ESS converts to normal 90% for compulsory takeover rules, this didn't vote are going to become important because to get a delisting, they would need to be engaged with and vote yes. Based on 14% of total shareholders voting yes for this scheme, that's not going to happen at anything close to 50c. Most are either not engaged or happy to just see what unfolds from the sidelines.
One of the reasons TEAL may have decided to at least pause if not walk away is that MIN have prevented this variant of the scheme of arrangement working. If MIN is genuinely interested in controlling Spod Ore, the price they become a seller of the 20% stake may be a lot more than TEAL wants to pay. Additionally there's the factor that lithium sentiment is a lot weaker now than when TEAL launched the bit. When launched Chinese lithium carbonate was circa 490,000/t (trading economics) and now its 177,500/t (again trading economics). If this price had of remained around 500k I think there probably would have been a revised higher bid.
It remains interesting to see how this unfolds (even as now a non-holder) because I'm pretty certain there will be more lithium related takeovers.
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