Cazz, I'll pretty much back what Rocko says.
SYR is the canary in the coal mine as far as super pits and Chinese deals go. No self respecting board or management, in any industry, would 100% equity fund a development when debt costs are next to zero in real terms. The use of 100% equity is a massive indication that their model doesn't work (or at least insofar as genuine western banks are concerned). Put it this way, with debt costs in nonimal terms a little bit above 5% for decent international projects (sometimes even under 5%), why the f&k would any management raise equity when equity holders generally want a return% above 10%. SYR raising all their equity is like a petulant child who takes their bat and ball and goes home, except in their case they are saying to all the financiers and genuine graphite buyers "we don't care what you say, we have plenty of cash to make our mine, and then we'll just see what happens". In effect, SYR has bet the house on 5 on the roulette table, and I give them the same amount of chance (1/37) of being a long term profitable cashflow investment at their current share price.
In recent years, we've seen LMB fiasco, SYR have had excuses and delays with their agreements, TON are similar (seriously, does anyone think that a $hundred million buy agreement feasibility needs to be delayed by 6 months just because they want to add a different part of the resource into the mix), and MNS don't really appear to have the "unconditional access to capital" that their holders have been sprouting prior to their last CR. The last (MNS) is actually a shame, because their graphite quality is vastly superior to SYR and TON. All of these superpits (ex LMB, I'm not calling them a superpit anymore) have to go through a learning process that their plans for mega production are not viable in the normal world without genuine buyers and financiers, and the Chinese aren't that. None will go from "nothing" to a "producing superpit". They all have to start small, then scale up, growing with their buyers. The problem is their market caps (for SYR and fully diluted-MNS in particular) are too big for their boards to turn around to their shareholders and say "we got it wrong, we were too bullish, the genuine buyers aren't there, we need to only open a small plant initially".
Contrast that with KNL, which came out (and everyone ignored them) with the first genuine offtake on the ASX (and second globally) and plans to make a 20 ktpa mine. Then, with additional off-take interest, they upscaled that to the massive production target of 40 ktpa. Ours isn't a sexy headline nameplate production target, but it is economically viable, with genuine (and committed) Western buyers. Even though many Chinese entities are state owned, SYR/MNS/TON can't even come out with a government guarantee for financing from the Chinese government to help their own state-owned buyers out. The German government, which owns nothing of the EGT or ThyssenKrupp, is willing to come out with a sovereign debt guarantee to support their companies. KNL had a potential offer from Chinese, and immediately declined to proceed any further with them. Their decision will ultimately prove to have been extremely prescient.
Finally, I'll remind you about an interesting point. In graphite mining, buyers are your partners. Buyers are essential to getting a graphite mine into production. Our buyers have seen and tested numerous graphite samples and spoken with numerous potential graphite miners, or at the very least, with all the potentially serious ones. And after looking at what they had on offer, the only two European offtakes on the ASX went to KNL. Not SYR, MNS, TON, LMB, or not even VXL which is technically in production (even if it's not selling anything of note).
As far as investing goes (I draw a distinction here with trading, which is not my forte), KNL is head-and-shoulders above the rest in terms of it's business case, mitigating risk, and ultimately profitability.
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