This is the glass & ceramics market in the year 2018, according...

This is the glass & ceramics market in the year 2018, according to Benchmark Minerals Intelligence, 46,500 LCE or 470,000t equivalent of 4% low iron petalite concentrate.





Bikita Minerals produced 8'500 LCE and they are our neighbours in Zimbabwe. They have no known expansion plans.

Talison Lithium (51% Tianqi & 49% Albemarle owned) produced 22'500 LCE. It looks like Albemarle (and Tianqi in Kwinana) is wanting to use its spodumene from early 2021 to feed their new hydroxide plant, as they can earn more when refining their spodumene instead of selling it to the glass&ceramics and battery chemistry markets.




Brine producers are the third group in the galss & ceramics market with 15'500 LCE. I have heard that most likely Orocobre, SQM have some issues with some of their brine and can not sell it to the tier one battery quality cathode producers and dump their lowest quality products also in the glass & ceramics market.

Prospect Resources has an binding offtake agreement now with the global leader for minerals supply, Sibelco, for up to 100'000t of our ultra low iron petalite for 7 years. With our new success in petalite recovery we can produce another 94'000t ultra low iron petalite. Since we are very lucky to have such a great Arcadia project where our spodumene has low iron as well and meet the specifications of the glass & ceramics market, we could sell all them together as a blended product and could supply Sibelco with up to 367'000t (100'000t ultra-low + 94'000t recovery + 173'000t spodumene). If Albemarle (Talison) retracts from the glass & cermaics market because of their hydroxite plans, that should be possible for us.
Well, it would not be that easy, because we have an existing offtake agreement with Sinomine, but more on that maybe on a next post.

Pricing:
Now. The most important part, about the ultra low iron petalite pricing.
We have great products and we will achieve premium pricing for our ultra low iron products, petalite and spodumene. And I believe those prices can be around or even higher than US$1'300-1'400 for our ultra low iron petalite. But, we as Prospect will never get the whole amount of these end-user prices, because we will have at least one middle-man, Sibelco and we have to share it with them.
Sibelco operates in 31 countries, but it might be that they work with some distributions agents in some regions of the world.
Bikita Minerals and Talison Lithium sell some or all of their niche low iron petalite/spodumene products with agents indirectly as well.
Therefore our management team calculates in our latest DFS with those prices, which are great and allow us to have a payback period of our CAPEX for only 1,5 years.






I am looking forward to the updated DFS economics.

And as always.
This is my personal opinion only and it is not financial advice. Do your own research.