Thank you,
@Macklemore. Lepidico certainly has an interesting history. It can't hurt, I suppose, for those of us who have held from the beginning of our public listing to share what we can, if our confidence in LPD's management and ever-evolving tech helps assuage the concerns of newer holders, who may justifiably be feeling unnerved by our presently ridiculous share price.
As complicated as our story is, it felt straightforward enough in the early years. Lots of JVs, developments in our processes, fending off a takeover attempt, the building of our pilot plant, attracting the interest of large players such as BASF, progressing in all regards.
Halfway through 2019, around the time of our sudden merger with Desert Lion Energy, in one fell swoop acquiring Karibib and a Phase 1 location in Abu Dhabi, speaking from my experience only, a subtle shift began.
Our US, Australian and Japanese patents were being approved, "Highest Purity Lithium Carbonate Produced" (99.95%) was announced, as was "High Specification Caesium-Rubidium Formate" and "High Purity Lithium Hydroxide." Management delivered a fabulous DFS, but distance was growing with our substantial shareholder Galaxy and the spreading of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUDding) on HC became deafening. Then towards the end of 2020, enter (drum roll) the US International Development Finance Corp.
A month later, rather than receiving notification that our LOI with BASF would again be extended another year to 31 December 2021, a non-disclosure agreement was requested. This diminished transparency continued through 2021 as we garnered increasing anonymous interest in our products from multiple parties, including a Tier 1 consumer (informed by our quarterly reports and announcements), culminating in our pre Christmas Traxys announcement of 16 December 2021.
The first day the ASX traded in 2022, Tuesday 4 January, we were greeted with 2 announcements informing us that our largest shareholder, Strategic Metallurgy, sold 37M shares to fund the purchase of our pilot plant's neighbouring property, so as to double our pilot plant's size, enabling an increase in the production and diversity of customer samples. Clearly, demand and interest in our products is there, however disconcerting the tightening of the invisibility cloak may be (through our 100% binding offtake agreement with Traxys).
So what's the point of my big ramble? That if anyone else here has felt like we're watching a chess match, the cleverness of this strategic move or that, as shareholders, financiers, customers, employees all progress steadily across the board towards our destinations of Phase 1, Phase 2, third party feed stock or licensing agreements, further technological developments and really who knows what else management may have up their sleeve, you're not alone.
JW and GJ keep us in the loop as we progress to production (through ASX announcements, but also generous video interviews, investor reports and the like), but seemingly there is much they are unable to disclose, thus my analogy to chess- that we see individual movements at a particular place or time, but not necessarily the whole picture, which includes the strategic plan of advance. More to add here, but this post is long enough, so I'll elaborate another day. AJIMHO, DYOR
What I intended to post today was a chronology of past JVs as an overview of some our "20 different lithium mica and lithium phosphate deposits globally...successfully tested for their amenability to produce nominalbattery grade lithium chemicals" from page 3 of our Annual Report. Next up.
(20min delay)