You misunderstood. The DFS is important and obviously needed to move the company forward, I agree with that. My point is that much of the DFS is already known. We know the production quantities of each product and rough current prices. We can extrapolate Opex and Capex with a decent range from the PFS and macro inflation.
Many people have done so on these threads with various estimates, myself included. It's not that hard to have a guess and therefore expectations.
The market being forward looking, it's safe to assume some of these expectations are built into the share price, not all.
I don't understand how someone would look at a 300m$ MC pre-revenue company aiming to raise ~1.5bn$ and say there's more uncertainty around a DFS than around funding. Especially in the current macro of central banks tightening and rising rates. That's a massive and extremely rare achievement.
The DFS is just a study, it's happening and the NPV announced will be substantially higher than the market cap, I don't think anybody doubt that. The DFS can't be a big surprise to the downside either after GM did 8 months of due diligence and went in. It would defy common sense. Same about the Direct Ni process, everybody wouldn't be so upbeat if this wasn't all go ahead on the technical side after years of piloting and studies. In my experience, studies very rarely justify massive rerate by themselves. Especially DFS as they come after scoping studies and PFS.
Again, in my opinion, the project will be much much further derisked by a 500m$ NAIF loan which would cover around ~60% of our funding needs with K-sure and EFA. Clarity on the funding structure is another big unknown. If we had to raise 40% of the Capex via equity, it would be very, very dilutive depending on the SP at the time. At current prices, it would roughly triple shares on issue. Any confirmation of an extra X% funded by debt or any other non-diluting mean is a massive desriking event from an investing perspective.
This is quite theoretical as much of all of this could happen very quick and make the point of which ann is more important moot, but I remain convinced there's a LOT more uncertainty around funding than the DFS.
To put number on what I mean, Yes, we could hit 30c on the DFS, but people expecting us to hit 70c-1$ are setting themselves up for disappointment I reckon. I doubt we can get over 30% of the NPV without more information about the funding.
But hey, I hold 2m of these babies, so I would be more than happy to be proven wrong. And a solid rerate would make a world of a difference for a palatable equity portion of the funding so I would definitely welcome it with open arms.
QPM Price at posting:
17.0¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held