Your assumptions are safe enough - unless they have had some major hiccup in commissioning the hydrocyclones, there should be upside on both cost per tonne and tonnes produced.
You may have been a bit conservative on the average price received - with the current pricing, I can see potential for 10,700 USD/t average for the March quarter and maybe more if they have a volume surge in March. That being the case, gross margin moves to around 7,200 USD/t
Bad news - who knows?
We do know the tonnes produced, the revenue, and the costs for the first half. No surprises there.
We are expecting progress on tonnes output, so lack of progress there would be bad news. Personally, I would rather have seen a second thickener than hydrocyclones, but we should get some feedback on progress tomorrow.
We are expecting progress on phase 2 - no specific milestones due at this time so no bad news likely.
We have seen the Advantage deal go through - it is all being finalised subsequent to balance date so nothing material there that would constitute bad news.
We have seen that some players expect a capital raise for phase 2. This seems very unlikely in my opinion - the cash doesn't start flowing out until the earth moving machinery moves in and we are some way off that at this point in time. Furthermore, it is only a CR issue if the earth is moved faster than they ship Lithium. Personally I think it can be done without a CR. No bad news there.
I took a look at the shorting activity - there is an awful lot of churn there. From the 30th Jan to 21 Feb, aggregate shorts went from 15,650,679 to 21,242,199 - an increase of 5.59 million shares - during the same period 15.5 million shares were traded in short sells. A quick in and out - hit and run for most of these players. Not very sticky at all. Typical day trader short term momentum stuff rather than any deeply held conviction on fundamentals in my opinion.
To come back to the consensus
of analysts
"The 8 analysts offering 12 month price targets for Orocobre Limited have a median target of 4.98, with a high estimate of 6.25 and a low estimate of 3.73. The median estimate represents a 33.14% increase from the last price of 3.74."
The smart money went short at the familiar position just shy of $5 and no doubt pulled their bets off the table a long while back. Who knows where the punters adding to short positions now are seeing downside. At some point we'll see the share price move the other way and then we'll see that shorts have stop losses as well...
