The trophy cabinet

If Argentina had not won the soccer World Cup last year would Lionel Messi still be considered one of the all time greats of the game?

Well, yes, of course, but the fact that Argentina did win last year's World Cup only emphasises, underlines and confirms his greatness.

If Allkem does not regularly report significant milestones on its journey of growth can it still reach its quest to be the third biggest lithium producer in the world?

Well, yes, maybe, but by regularly reporting milestones, trophies if you will, the company emphasises, underlines and confirms that Allkem really is a serious player in the world of battery materials.

Maybe I should elaborate ...

A concern I had with the Olaroz Galaxy merger was the decision to move the new company's head office to where its MD, Martin Perez de Solay, lives. Clearly, good for him, but for the company? I thought there was a risk that the senior executive team would in time grow out of sync with the company's shareholders, who are mostly back in Oz.

I think MD Martin and his team have made genuine efforts, for example with last April's strategy day and by their regular fantastic briefings, to bridge that separation between them and us. But I think the dislocation does exist. For shareholders and the market it is not enough that Martin's team goes into great detail when they talk about the various projects they are progressing. What the market and Allkem's shareholders need in addition to the detail are regular milestones / trophies - even Liverpool FC needs to win trophies every so often to keep its world-wide fanbase activated. To put it another way, I am fairly sure that 4 million people would not have gone onto the streets of Buenos Aires if France had won. It is not enough that MD Martin and his team are head down bum up, the only real way shareholders can gauge that all that work is being done is if we see that they are hitting milestones, winning trophies.

So I appeal to the Argentinian in MD Martin: for gawd's sake .... give us some trophies!!!

I reckon so far they have three, maybe four, major trophies in the cabinet:

1. Olaroz - a bit of a Maradona achievement here as after 10 years of trying they have not yet hit nameplate. That takes little from the fact that Olaroz was the first new lithium brine project in over two decades anywhere in the world, great courage and prescience from the old Orocobre team - I'm not even sure if there has been another brine project that has gone into production since Olaroz started.

2. Mt Cattlin - orders of magnitudes smaller than its WA peers but was one of only 3 WA production facilities in the early days of the lithium super-cycle. Fantastic foresight by the old Galaxy team. As an aside if Galaxy had managed to secure the Bald Hill project back then Galaxy in itself would now be one of the WA lithium hard rock monsters. Allkem should work harder to retain its foothold in the WA lithium sector.

3. the merger - no doubt Allkem is far greater than Orocobre and Galaxy separated. I reckon the merger kicked off when Orocobre went after Sal de Vida when Galaxy realised how daunting developing a lithium brine project would be. By bringing together the three stages of Olaroz and the two stages of Sal de Vida Allkem can cement itself as a lithium golden triangle monster. Then there is Quebec ....

4. Naraha - just waiting on the video assistant referee to come back with confirmation on this one but hopefully Naraha not only is Allkem's first venture into dedicated downstream processing it is also the first time that it has dealt directly with the Toyota mothership. If Naraha gets into actual production I think its success will propagate even greater opportunities.

So come on, Martin, there's plenty of space left in the trophy cabinet. And not all trophies need to be world cups. How about setting a goal of delivering at least one identifiable trophy in every reporting quarter (in fact you could use the awarding of the trophy as the quarterly headline!).