I'm not convinced HCk won't get up, so i don;t couch my posts thus, just have concerns that it won't. Some others here are convinced it will and happy to bang the drum about it everyday, and being rather rude about it. Be nice to the bears, especially those with some nous, it's better for everyone that way...
"My logic stems out from the fact that over 90% of the mag REE is processed by China, the relevant technology is not understood by rest of the world to copy from."... that is pertinent. The easiest thing is to mine and concentrate RE ore, harder to crack/leach it into an intermediate product, harder still to separate individual Re oxides from each other, and difficult to turn those RE-oxides into metals and then magnets at quality, scale and competitive cost.
ARR in a similar boat to most miners... trying to produce separated Re-oxides to sell to metal/magnet makers, if not an intermediate mixed RE product. Most of them don;t have the tech skills to do it, although they all can get the lab work testing done, pay for pilot programmes and even buy in employees with sufficient knowledge to 'have a crack' pardon the pun. Beneficiation and leaching are not really novel processes, though there are plenty of new ideas always floating around. Maybe ARR has advantages with organic separation tech or what not, haven;t looked into it.
The biggest problem is downstream of the mine, because it gets more difficult, and China is just that much better and cheaper. ILU still hasn't got any offtake in place, sure they will but there just isn't the western companies with tech and knowhow stepping up to the plate yet to compete with China. I suspect it will take much longer than most think to organise, fund and build out the downstream ex-China Re capacity than for LYC or ILU to expand and another X thousand tonnes of NdPr to the market. In short, RE ore, mid-product and even separated RE-oxide is and will remain a highly price sensitive and competitive space so long as there are more Re mines then there are western magnet makers.
MP minerals building their own magnet facility to see how it goes with US guv support, I'm sure LYC is looking to get further downstream into magnets and ILU is asking Oz guv to subsidise them into RE-metal and magnets to solve the off-take issue. Nobody wants to give a free kick to juniors and all the downstream guys are finding dance partners. ARR in the right place, right time maybe, but do they have the right cost base to be competitive with many other wannabes?
Good luck
PS... stopped talking to ASX management a long time ago. Things are much clearer considering results without them pissing in my pocket on the sales pitch.
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