We would love to hear your thoughts about our site and services, please take our survey here.
London South East prides itself on its community spirit, and in order to keep the chat section problem free, we ask all members to follow these simple rules. In these rules, we refer to ourselves as "we", "us", "our". The user of the website is referred to as "you" and "your".
By posting on our share chat boards you are agreeing to the following:
The IP address of all posts is recorded to aid in enforcing these conditions. As a user you agree to any information you have entered being stored in a database. You agree that we have the right to remove, edit, move or close any topic or board at any time should we see fit. You agree that we have the right to remove any post without notice. You agree that we have the right to suspend your account without notice.
Please note some users may not behave properly and may post content that is misleading, untrue or offensive.
It is not possible for us to fully monitor all content all of the time but where we have actually received notice of any content that is potentially misleading, untrue, offensive, unlawful, infringes third party rights or is potentially in breach of these terms and conditions, then we will review such content, decide whether to remove it from this website and act accordingly.
Premium Members are members that have a premium subscription with London South East. You can subscribe here.
London South East does not endorse such members, and posts should not be construed as advice and represent the opinions of the authors, not those of London South East Ltd, or its affiliates.
Anyone thinking of investing in BMN might find that transcript a good read. A visit to the Bushveld Perspective website might also be time well spent in researching BMN.
https://www.thebushveldperspective.com
Part 4
Of course we have also committed ourselves to further growing production at Vametco beyond that level to 4200 mtV on the back of some capital expenditure to increase the capacity of the plant. Something which we will obviously update the market as we do more work in respect of this. But I couldn't be more happy with the progress that we have seen at Vametco. We have a very motivated staff employee base which is all working all in one direction with us to ensure that Vametco unlocks it's true potential. We should never forget and I think lose sight of the importance of this asset and obviously with Vanchem coming onboard it will also play an important role. Just underscoring the significant strides we've made in terms of for example getting alignment with our workforce when we negotiated our wage agreement this year for the next we were able to agree that very quickly, just in 3 sittings, and that's something that bodes well going forward with the belief that we are very well positioned to continue driving improvements in the operations of Vametco. We want to be the lowest cost producer of vanadium and an important part of that is driving more throughput through the plant and extracting as much efficiencies as we can do."
"Well Fortune thank you very much. It's great to speak to you and Mikhail today and look forward to speaking to you again soon."
FM "Thank you. Thank you for your time."
MN "thank you very much."
Part 3
"So Mikhail the RedT / Avalon investment is part of a broader initiative into the VIP. Can you give us an update here?"
MN "Absolutely. I think one of the things that we can also do as Bushvleld is to help mobilise additional funding to go into investment to go into these companies. We have done very well but we are not somebody that can carry the entire industry. However we think that we know the industry quite well. We obviously have the best line of sight in terms of how the issues of vanadium supply can be solved to enable the industry to be successful as demand rises. By making commitments ourselves we feel that can actually unlock quite a bit of additional investment. What we want to do with the platform is to make sure that we are not the only investor that comes in to a strong and growing VRFB company. So in a way we can kind of mobilise and multiply our investment to bring in external funding and that's really what the VIP is all about."
"Now Fortune you have made significant strides at Vametco from an operational perspective as well as with stakeholder engagement. Tell us more."
FM "Absolutely. I should just say that as I have indicated Vametco is at the core of what we do. It is until the acquisition of Vanchem the sole and core source of our revenues and our cash flows. It provided us the platform to expand our business into the energy storage market which we are very excited about. What that means is that it is absolutely important that Vametco operates and performs to its potential. Since the acquisition of Vametco we have been fairly clear that we saw significant opportunities to do 2 things. 1 is to increase production throughput significantly and secondly to also just improve the operational efficiencies of the plant. We have been engaged with a transformation programme there which is looking to address those 2 key elements. We are very happy with the results of that work which has seen the company improve its performance across all key metrics. One particular notable one being the fact that we produced in September 310 mtV, which is the highest the plant has produced from just magnetite concentrate. That is a great result. We expect to see that continue and we have always been clear that we are focussed to get Vametco producing up to 3400 mtV pa run rate just on the back of operational improvements, efficiency improvements. We are well on our way to achieving that.
No pickleadhead.... He is reminding newbies about how much is going on and to ignore trolls....
Part 2
"Thank you Fortune. Now Mikhail turning to you it would be great to get an update on Bushveld Energy. Tell us more about your strategy as well going forward."
MN "Our strategy is really focussed on 3 directions. 1 is around vanadium electrolyte where we are building a facility to produce in SA and we have already deployed a rental product to allow customers to not buy the vanadium electrolyte as part of the value to actually rent that out to reduce the upfront costs. The second part is around manufacturing where we have set out a strategy of how we work together with the VRFB manufacturers though a platform that we've set up, a vanadium investment platform VIP, and very recently we announced our first investment under that which is linked to the proposed merger between two vanadium battery companies, Avalon Batteryout of North America and RedT which is listed in London. And then the third part is within Africa we look to deploy batteries within projects that require quite a bit of energy storage and we've done a system with the utility here. We are building a minigrid at one of our mines and we are actually building quite an extensive pipeline of in most cases renewable energy pairs with the long duration storage."
"And Mikhail you've recently announced your RedT / Avalon investment. Tell us about this and the significance for Bushveld."
MN "This is part of one of the ways that we engage with VRFB manufacturers. I think that these two companies are very complimentary in what they do. They have both been in the market for a few years. Avalon battery focussing more on the North American market and in China, with RedT more focussed on the European market and on project development and they are quite strong there. We really like the management team that Avalon brings. We like some of the expertise that RedT has developed. We don't we a lot of capitalisation between them and I think one major benefit is these are two companies that are still quite small. Together they are larger and one of the key challenges is to this technology is to get to scale. There's a very positive cycle that happens when you achieve economies of scale. Your costs come down. You get more projects as you are more competitive. You get more scale so it's a very nice positive cycle. We feel that 2 companies working together are going to get there much faster and at much less cost, and as an investor that's extremely appealing. That's why we support this transaction."
Part 1
"Welcome to BRR Media. Today I am joined by BMN following their operational update. Fortune and Mikhail it's great to have you with us."
FM "Thanks for having us it's good to be here."
"Thank you both and looking at Bushveld Vanadium first, Fortune update us on the company's activities over the quarter, particularly on the successful completion of the Vanchem Processing Facility. Now that you own 2 of the 4 operating primary processing facilities in the world how does this shape your strategy."
FM "Indeed. We have explained and outlined the strategy a couple of years ago already which is basically the script from which we operate, which is all about the vision to create a significant low cost and vertically integrated vanadium platform and in respect of which there's two key aspects to what we do, building our resource base and our production platform which is essentially centred around 3 deposits on the Bushveld Complex which combined for 550 million tonnes which is the largest primary vanadium resource base of any company in the world with tier 1 vanadium grades, combined with processing facilities that will allow us to supply vanadium and have a significant share of the global vanadium market. Those facilities essentially being the Vametco assets which we acquired from Evraz 2 years ago and which is currently the flagship and the core of our cash generation, and from which we have supplied just under 3% of the vanadium global market. We have since added Vanchem, which we completed yesterday, and Vanchem essentially brings an additional asset, a primary processing asset, and between Vanchem and Vametco post the refurbishment of Vanchem and some expansion initiatives at Vametco should see us grow our production to 8400 mtV pa over the next 5 years. That's a more than 3 fold increase in our production which would give us just under 10% of the global vanadium market. Our entire approach has been making sure that we've got a large resource base and we've got scaleable flexible and low cost production platform, which we are now in a position to do with both Vametco and Vanchem.
As you know we produced about just under 3% of the global market last year from Vametco. That really gives us a good platform to then develop the downstream energy business through Bushveld Energy whose sole focus is to promote the deployment of VRFBs in what is a multi billion dollar and growing stationary energy storage market."
As news is quiet this seems like a good opportunity to republish the transcript of the above interview from a couple of months back just to remind ourselves where this company is heading ... to create a large low cost vertically integrated vanadium platform.
And BMN seems to have the management expectise to deliver on that.