Questions to Management - What is going on? Official., page-378

At the time they entered the Agreement cobalt prices were ok, so at the time I expected the deal to be settled in 6 months, noting it was the DRC. Given the plant wasn't operational a sale can occur quite quickly - also be mindful during downturns people T/O things quite fast as well (as they do in an upturn) so it is a function of documentation and process and funding.

If the issue is more around process and documentation then someone or some jurisdiction is going to slow, assuming teh company itself is not at fault of documentation.

I suspect the issue here may be when the cobalt price fell that i.) the capex cost of getting the plant into working order plus ii.) the price the cobalt DRC suppliers wanted for their ore (and thus making them profitable because noone suppliers ore at a loss) plus iii.) getting buyers of the copper/cobalt hydroxide product from the plant meant that speed to market became not a factor for finalising the deal.

In other words without offtake buyers difficult to get finance and also reduces the speed of getting things done at a jurisdictional level plus company level (and what I am saying here is WFE is no BHPB who can shop around during a downturn for bargains and then set them aside and put them into production when things turn - when WFE finalises the deal here it cannot sit on the deal, it needs to start producing and selling to make project economics stack up). But things are turning again so suspect there will be haste to get this deal down IMO, but if it is not done in the next 3 to 6 months then there are real problems here IMO.

And the key here is does the plant owner have other options on who to sell the plant to - in an upturn suspect they will as cobalt prices improve and more supply is required by the market, so that will be the ultimate test of whether WFE has their act together to get this over the line, hence my comments around does the deal have sunset clauses and get out clauses since the passage of time of when the deal was enacted last year.

Just a guess and hypothesis that my 9th personality is addressing in my head - comment to you @apkjm LOL.

Hope this helps discussion etc etc etc, rather than what has been debated last few days here.

All IMO IMO IMO IMO