Some time back you provided us with an insightful and compelling narrative as to why Smedvig might have departed.
At the time, the official story that they'd done their bit to get Talga through the teething stage and it was time to move on just didn't ring true for me.
Smedvig provides venture capital, it funds promising juniors to accelerate their growth and commercialisation. It does not run incubators to help inventors flesh out ideas nor is it an angel investor that provides seed capital to finance the initial stage of growth.
In short, Smedvig is about financing companies that are already over that initial hump. So what went wrong.
Purely a guess but one possibility is that Smedvig's price was too high and Mark resisted, perhaps some of the initial feedback from customers was less than flattering and that made the investment too risky or maybe the pathway to commercialisation was just too long, or perhaps they simply couldn't agree on how to commercialise the product...who knows.
What we do know is that around the same time and just after the cap raise, one of Talga's OEM customers complained about the batteries it was testing that used Talga's anode material. Whether or not it was the anode that underperformed or something else we do not know but shortly after Smedvig departed and the share price went into a tailspin...probably all co-incidental.
It seems we had gone from being ready to press the button on fast-tracking the pathway to production to picking up the pieces.
Interestingly, what is clear between the release of the PFS and the DFS, is that the company has seen fit to plan for a significantly larger spend on equipment to spheronise and coat the anode material, in fact many tens of millions of dollars more. Of course, that might be due solely to enable the production of more specialised forms of anode material for purposes not previously part of the plan.
Either way, the timetable has been slipped by over twelve months implying that at least some qualification testing might have had to begin again.
The above is all speculation and I really have no idea why Smedvig departed nor why the timeline to production has been slipped.
Perhaps one day the full story, if it hasn't already been released, will come out. . But the question remains, why would Smedvig with its eagle eye for picking winners just up and walk away.
TLG Price at posting:
$1.43 Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
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