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Quarterly update will be next week. I contacted the company last week asking them exactly which date it'll be released, but they couldn't say. They did confirm it'd be before 30th June though.

I keep asking them to publish a "Key Dates" calendar for these sort of updates, and they did previously agree, but they haven't published it yet. Bigger things on their minds I guess :-)

I'm not sure that those who took part in the placing will be too bothered by the drop from 25p. There were only 6 (or perhaps 7, it's a little unclear in the RNS) people who bought shares in the placing, and many of those may have been recipients of the £1.3m that CRTM spent on buying the remaining 43% of Madini Occidental in December 2022.

I may be wrong, but to me it looks like those funds being recycled back into CRTM for another 2,400,000 shares (along with extra warrants). So they are buying more CRTM shares with money from CRTM, so the small drop probably isn't of too much concern.

Madini Occidental must have been some business for the amount that CRTM spent buying it....

Thanks for that. AV remaining extremely positive. The next few months promise an exciting news flow for Andrada.

June will have the usual quarterly production update, expected to show the expanded tin plant still running well. The lithium bulk testing plant should finish the build phase.

July should have the commissioning of the lithium plant, and Tantalum coming on-stream (at $200k-$500k per month revenue, at a huge margin, will certainly help cashflow).

August, audited annual results to Feb 2023.

September, or thereabouts, an announcement on the strategic partner process.

That's quite enough to have happening over the summer !!! I'm still very happy to holding these.

I’ll give you my opinion, as someone who looked, and is still looking, but hasn’t bought in.

My reasons for not buying include that I think Molulu is a long way from meaningful revenue, that the founders have been too interested in diverting funds in their own direction, there is no JORC compliant resource estimate, and the current valuation seems high for what you get.

They paid USD300,000 for 70% of Molulu, they had about £1m in cash left at the start of the year and from what I see they haven’t built or bought anything of significant value, and the current valuation is nearly £13m.

26-Jan-23 they said “Copper oxide production commenced at the Molulu Project” and “The copper ore produced in January 2023 will be stockpiled for sale into the market in February 2023”.

By 15-May-23 the update was “Potential buyers of ore visiting Molulu, first sales to be completed once transport infrastructure is complete”. They have mined 6,500 tonnes since end of January (1,625 tonnes per month, or 19,500 tonnes on an annualised basis). They haven’t currently transported this ore anywhere. They estimate producing 120,000 tonnes per year.

The road and bridge infrastructure needed to support the transport of 120,000 tonnes of ore per year, 100km each way from Molulu to any of the processing facilities in Lubumbashi, is not insignificant given the location of Molulu. 20km of the 100km is on a dirt road, of which CRTM plan to upgrade around 12km of it.

Assume that they can transport ore for 9 months of the year and have to stop during rainy season. Assume the road can take 50 tonne trucks (unlikely, but let’s be generous). They need 9 trucks running constantly, every single day for those 9 months, to hit 120,000 tonnes per year. If they have to use 30 tonne trucks, they need 15 of them running constantly up and down the road. That upgraded “dirt road” will be taking a lot of heavy traffic, without even considering the bridge, and the transport and maintenance costs could be very high.

In summary, I just don’t buy the story at the moment There’s just too much risk for me at the current levels. No doubt “iknownuffin” will be along shortly to tell me I don’t understand anything about CRTM, and that’s fine. There are no financials to analyse or argue over here, there are not enough assets to say it’s cheap or expensive, it’s just a matter of whether you believe the story or not, and I just don’t.

@pekingduck - that's exactly the question I've asked him too, so hopefully we get a clear answer on that. I would expect him to have some knowledge of the governments plans.

And not to forget the tin (where the price is holding up pretty well lately) - I've also asked him what the plans are for any ore-sorting technology on the tin circuit. The Orion Financing, which it seems is still on the table, appears to come with penalties if they're not producing 2,000tpa by 30 June 2024. That is way above the current tin production, and I've not seen a firm plan on how it'll be increased again post the expansion. I know they are looking at ore-sorting with a couple of suppliers, but I haven't seen much in the way of detail.

Hi Jeli, the company tweeted about the visit on 26th July 2022. They said “It’s been a good day hosting #lithium industry players at our Uis Mine. As we progress with our confirmatory drill programme, we look forward to bringing our #lithium and #tantalum streams into production.”.

They added pictures in the tweet. They didn’t name anyone, but their visitor badges were visible in the pictures, and one Chinese looking gentleman had a badge on saying “David Teng”. If you Google him, other pictures make it clear it’s the same David Teng from Hainan.

https://twitter.com/andrada_mining/status/1551942561534820353?s=46&t=0TyeLmWomthDoi0sRA_GeQ

I was thinking about the recent news over the weekend, joining the dots on a few things and adding 2 and 2 and coming up with 5 !!

There was a site visit to Uis in July 2022, and Lei (David) Teng, vice chairman of Hainan Mining, visited.

Hainan Mining are a large Chinese miner (a subsidary of Fosun), mainly iron ore, but in August 2021, they had announced they were moving into lithium and would be investing $164m in building a lithium processing plait in Hainan Province. They started building it in December 2022, and it's expected to take 12-18 months.

In November 2022, Anthony Viljeon was giving a talk to some South African geologists (https://youtu.be/gHOpa2q6Ij4) and said that during the July 2022 site visits the "Chinese delegation" had said "I'll buy this", and that "the numbers were eye watering".

In Jan 2023, Hainan invested $117m into Kodal Minerals, who have an early stage lithium prospect in Mali - the investment is to fund the build and scale up. If I'm reading it correctly, they have a resource estimate for LiO2 of around half the size of Andrada. They are expecting to start producing sometime in 2024. The share price of Kodal is up nearly fourfold since the news, and they have a market cap of £137m.

I'm now wondering if there was more to the "I'll buy it" comment than it seemed at the time, and which clearly seems to have come from Hainan.

Hainan are in the market for lithium supply to feed their plant, have already invested in Africa, and Andrada is on their radar.

Correction - Xinfeng licence is ML243, not ML234 as I put below

It's certainly exciting times for lithium in Nambia.

Xinfeng have been mining and exporting lithium ore to China from their licence area ML234, just up the road from Andrada.

On Monday of this week, the mining minister in Namibia revoked their licence. Not sure if I have it fully correct, but from what I read, it seems they had a licence to export ore to China for testing purposes, as they said they wanted to build a lithium processing plant in Namibia, but they needed to send some ore to China for "testing". However, they've exported around 75,000 tonnes !!

The mining minister in Namibia also stated recently - "We are going to insist that all lithium mined within the country has to be processed in the country.", and with no processing currently, someone needs to build it, so perhaps this is what the "vertically integrated" comment refers to ?

Also, Askari metals have been buying lithium areas around Andrada at Uis, and they've just had an investment, although small, from Hauyou Cobalt, who have a $12bn market cap and are buying up lithium mines.

Could be fun times ahead........

I think pekingduck is right. As late as March there was “significant progress” on the Orion financing, and it was expected to be completed in May.

Now in mid-May there is this news, which on the face of it would seem to indicate the Orion financing isn’t going to happen.

Doesn’t mean it’s bad news at all, may even be better and accelerate timelines, but it is different to what was expected.

Very interesting........

Yes, looking good. Solid Q1 update, good expectations for Q2, plenty of forecasts of a squeeze on copper supply throughout the year, talk of consolidation in the sector, and the share price moving in the right direction - there's a lot to like here !!

Big volume going through today - 5m shares traded already by 11am, and that's higher than all but a handful of days over the past year. Lots of chunky buys. Hopefully this is a sign that awareness of ATM is getting more widespread.

@iknownuffin - thanks for your informative responses

@iknownuffin - I seem to have annoyed you for some reason. As I said, I'm just trying to understand CRTM as it caught my eye. I've no interest in "deramps", and have no delusions that my questions on here would have any impact on a share price anyway.

At risk of annoying you further, I'm also curious about the mining licence - PEPM 14784. It is owned by Amani Minerals Katanga SARL, which is now 70% owned by CRTM.

When I look on the DRC mining licence database - http://drclicences.cami.cd/EN/ and search for PEPM 14784, it confirms it's owned by Amani and that it's an active licence, but it also says that it expires on 29th Dec 2024. I've not seen any mention of this on the website, or in any of the RNS announcements either.

Might be nothing important, might be easy to extend, but I would have expected it to be mentioned somewhere and yet I can't see anything on it. This sort of thing just bothers me. I understand it might not be of concern to others, and that's perfectly fine. Does anyone know anything about this licence expiring ?

Believe me, I ask more questions when I'm buying a toaster than I have asked about CRTM so far.

The FT article this morning stated :

"A pilot plant being built by Andrada, a London-listed miner, should produce its first batch of concentrated lithium by the end of June, using ore mined from the resurrected and expanded tin operation."

Hi, I'm totally new to CRTM and I've been reading to try to understand the current asset in Molulu. I'm not currently a holder as I'd like to understand it more before committing.

I see it's expected to produce 10,000 tonnes of copper oxide ore per month, but I can't see any information on offtake agreements for the ore, just a mention that it will be "sold into the market" and that there are several local processors. Has any information been published on who will take the ore, and what the expected revenue per tonne will be ? I see the copper grades are expected to be quite high (although I can't find any actual drill results), but the price a processor is willing to pay will be driven by the difficulty in processing it, even with high grades.

Also, does the company have any equipment in Molulu except the fuel storage, digger and large transport truck seen in the recent twitter post ? Running a mine needs more than a person in a digger, but I'm not seeing reference to much else. Is there any detail available on the mine plans ? I can't find any reference to those either ?

For a company that has announced it's producing ore already, there seems to be a lack of detail information readily available - or at least I'm struggling to find it.

I'd genuinely like to understand the Molulu asset. Can anyone point me to any detailed information in the areas I've mentioned ?

Wow - thanks for highlighting that article. That's a great coup for Andrada to get the FT to give them so much coverage and to base a Lithium/China article so heavily around Andrada.

Great exposure for the company.

And let’s also remember - AV put in £200,000 of his own cash at 5pps last September, and MR put in £30,000.

MR then put in another £30,000 at 4.97pps recently.

I think ore sorting has to be the answer, but there was no mention of it in the Q4 update.

I contacted the company, and they responded that an XRT sorter is being implemented as part of the bulk sampling lithium pilot plant which is being commissioned in June (good to hear they are still saying June !!).

They also said - "As per the 5-year strategy, the XRT sorter has the potential to enhance the tin grade and the company will be using the bulk sampling programme from June onwards to understand the most optimal set up for the Uis ore.".

So given they are implementing it, you would expect that they must have already done enough test work to be confident it'll improve the tin grade by enough to meet the Orion target.