News: ILU FOCUS-Mine waste finds new life as source of rare earths, page-24

There is no disputing who owns the stockpile, Google the recent the AFR story.
---------------------
Aug 28, 2023
Every day for the past 29 years, Geoff Dyer (iIluka veteran) has watched beige to black “monazite” sands being poured into a big hole at Eneabba in Western Australia.A price crash in the early 1990s had cruelled a lucrative trade in selling the mineral to French customers, who had previously extracted the rare earth elements in monazite to make fluorescent lights, magnets and glass.

The monazite was almost worthless by the time Dyer turned up for his first shift at Eneabba in October 1994, and he recalls being instructed to store the byproduct in a pit.“We didn’t have a market for it, didn’t know what to do with it, we just knew it had value,” he recalls.“So it was [put] into the pit. ‘Let’s store it there for a rainy day because somewhere in the future, it will have a purpose’. And that purpose is now coming back tenfold.”
Mining companies often cite “the time value of money” when explaining why it’s better to sell something today for a dollar, rather than two dollars tomorrow.
But at Eneabba – a tiny town in the sand plains three hours drive north of Perth – the time value of monazite has proved to be altogether different for Dyer’s employer, Iluka Resources.

O’Leary elaborated on why Iluka was willing to take the long view of shareholder value creation, during a panel session at The Australian Financial Review Mining Summit in May.“We could have just liquidated that [monazite] by exporting it to China. We didn’t,” he said on May 24. “We’ve pledged it to the refinery. It wasn’t just with a vision to process that [monazite], it was with a vision to having a piece of strategic infrastructure that would benefit Australia and its allies for many, many decades to come.”Australian taxpayers don’t often write billion-dollar loans to profitable companies with multibillion-dollar market capitalisations.Before lending $1.25 billion to Iluka in April 2022, Export Finance Australia (EFA) had never written more than $1.1 billion of total loans in any one of its 65 years in operation.
--------------------------

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that ILU the only rare earths stock that pays a dividend on the ASX.
All rare earth stocks have taken a beating recently from falling prices, but there is no doubt that ILU are well positioned for future growth.