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Yeh, it's the size of the titanium and flake graphite markets that restricts production volume here, not the size of the resource which is massive, and therefore the mine life could be up to 100 years, as Saipan mentioned in an interview.

Haha, sorry my bad. That's my Irishness subconsciously taking over while writing a quick post, I know Shaun Day's name. As someone with an Gaelic Irish spelling of my name, which people get wrong 80%+ of the time, I should do better!

I'm sure it will be a question for Sean at the TH. From my reading of the BBC article it was two petrol production units at the Geelong refinery that were directly effected by the fire, not the diesel or jet fuel units. Though the diesel and jet fuel units were being run at lower throughput as a safety precaution for the time being. While unhelpful, I don't think this really changes the picture re Greatland's diesel supplies.

Great presentation, thanks for posting! At one point Shaun seemed to call Telfer Havieron by mistake (while talking through a Telfer slide), but other than that it was very well delivered. Just can't get over the FCF generation here, Greatland are smashing the competition on all metrics it seems. Will be fascinating to see what we do with O'Callaghan's. It was good to see the comparative analysis on where the deposit sits globally in terms of size and grade.

Stonking DFS, which will only get better with the addition of the heavy rare earths as MarginMiner says. Market reaction so far has been underwhelming, which I will use as an opportunity for further top ups.

I tend to agree with Rick Rule, that valuing these long life mines on an NPV basis really misses the point. Anything beyond 15 years is so heavily discounted that it has a negligible impact on NPV. Saipan has talked about this being a 100 year mine. The NPV and IRR figures completely miss this point. At the end of the first 15 years of cashflow you get to start all over again. Our NPV and IRR also suffers from the fact that we have a phased ramp up.

If we instead look at an EBITDA multiple what do we get? Well steady state EBITDA is $476m. A typical EBITDA multiple for a large, low cost producer is over 10. But given we are in a relatively undeveloped mining jurisdiction, maybe we discount this to a 6-8 multiple to be conservative. That's a range of $2.85bn to $3.8bn. This is before we add in the heavy rare earths, before we account for cheap IDFC financing and doesn't take into account that we are going to be (imo) in a commodities super cycle over the next 5-10 years.

We are currently sitting at a market cap of $345m, which is roughly 10% of the mid point of the range I've given above. As Bonker pointed out on the Mkango board yesterday, projects with a DFS tend to be valued at circa 30% of NPV to account for execution risk. We enjoy the support of Rio, the IDFC, the Japanese government, the US government, Traxys and Mitsui, and have an extremely high quality DFS, so I would argue that 30% is on the low end for us (this project will get built!). But even by that metric, applied to my EBITDA multiple, we should be valued 200% higher than we are today, and that's before the heavy rare earths!

As for the 23% project IRR, as MarginMiner says, this will be greatly enhanced by the heavy rare earths. When we finance the project with low cost IDFC debt it will also mean an equity IRR which is substantially higher than this, I'm thinking 40-50%+. As for the comment about high capex, I don't think at $727m that it's particularly high to get to first production, particularly when we are talking about a potential 100 year mine and when we've got the backing of the IDFC, US and Japan who want / need this project to happen.

So all in all, I am extremely bullish and will increase my holding over the coming days at these prices (if they stay here). Well done Frank, Saipan and team.

Good to see a dedicated Rare Earth's ETF from Sprott as a sign that a broader range of investors are looking for exposure to the theme. Remember that as of March 31st, Sprott's Critical Materials ETF holds 1.12m Mkango shares, over £450k's worth. So hopefully as both ETF's grow we will benefit two times over.

$2.1bn not $2.1m of course…

Assuming $1.2bn at the low end of the valuation range I’ve used for Hypromag USA alone, the effective discount to NPV of the three US plants (which is approximately $2.1m) is effectively 43%, so not sure where the 30% comes from?

We’d be getting 57% of the NPV at the low end and 85% of the NPV at the top of the range. I agree that getting 30% of the NPV would be nowhere near enough. Sorry, on my phone so may not have explained myself very clearly.

That’s a difficult one to answer on my phone without my notes and spreadsheet in front of me. But I’ll have a rough and ready try.

We could do some rough bottom up analysis: If we have three plants at about $700m NPV each (without double checking the exact figures), let’s call it $2.1bn. If the sale were to happen post financing of the first then I’d probably apply something like a 30% discount to NPV for the first plant and a 60% discount to the next two, we’d be looking at $1.05bn. How much would they pay for the potential for plants 4-10? If any grant funding has been secured for our first plant I’d assume the NPV will be a fair bit higher and the discount applied may be lower. A fair price may be around $1.25bn, but that depends at what stage it happens, what kind of government support we’ve secured and what rare earth pricing is doing at the time.

USAR paid $200m for the loss making LCM. They valued it based on its strategic value, the expertise it gave them and the fact that there are very few Western companies that can do what LCM can do. Would they pay a massive premium for Hypromag’s market leading recycling tech and expertise?

Based on the fact that REEcycle are listing at $600m it would be hard to imagine that Cotec are willing to part with Hypromag USA below $1.2bn, given that they know an IPO would value it higher.

Myles has done lots of comparative analysis previously so would be a good source for a sensible price.

For the full global recycling business including Hypromag USA imo you’re probably adding 50%+.

So if we got an offer post FID for the first US plant and with UK and Germany fully commissioned and operating at 100-350tpa nameplate capacity, for the full business I would be looking for somewhere between $1.8bn-$2.5bn. That’s around $1-1.35bn for Mkango’s share. If the offer were just for Hypromag USA at the same stage I’d say $1.2-1.6bn. That’s around $0.5-0.65bn for Mkango’s share.

I’m sure some would call these figures bullish and others conservative. It probably all depends on your view on rare earth pricing and how important recycling’s role will be in the future. Those figures would certainly be enough for me to meet my goals.

If I were the "big" company, I'd be wanting to see proof of the recycling tech at scale, both the operational performance and the offtake / customers. If we didn't have this stupid 25tpa limit from the UoB then we'd be able to show that by now, but with Germany we should be able to get there soon. Once this is proven, I'd expect interest. USAR will know us well as they effectively have an insider with their ownership of LCM, who Hypromag collaborate with and have common history with.

Quiet here. Just noticed the big drop at lunchtime, from 38.5p to 36.5p within the space of 15 minutes, a bit unusual for here. The drop's been well bought. Time to find some funds for a top up.

I think if our business structure was less complex then they may have made an offer by now. Perhaps post MKAR SPAC would be the obvious time.

Maybe they would want Maginito as well as Cotec's share of Hypromag USA, as they may be concerned about buying the US company (without a commissioned plant right now) and decoupling it from the global company that has the expertise and operating plants to ensure the first US is commissioned successfully.

Who knows, but it would be a good end to my 10 years with Mkango if it does go that way, and at a price that would allow me to retire the day after...

Why not make us an offer for Hypromag USA to save us the trouble of SPACing it. I'd take $2bn.

Jbanzi, the detailed design and engineering work is what I think you’re referring to for the Texas plant, and yes this should be complete soon. Cotec have raised funds a while back to progress this work and to start stockpiling feedstock amongst other things. Their warrant acceleration the other day gives them a lot of additional cash.

We will be getting around 70% of the financing from EXIM and I expect the rest to come from one or more of the following: Cotec equity funding using cash they already have (may potentially need a further raise if no grant funding), commercial bank loans (we were apparently speaking to two commercial banks), grant funding (federal, state and / or municipal) and offtake financing.

I assume we will do a PIPE financing when we list Hypromag USA on the Nasdaq late 2026 / early 2027 (my bet is 2027 given all other timelines have slipped), but I assume the money from this would go to developing the second and third plants.

Jdbanzi, GLR, Myles and co on X are all referring to the Hypromag USA Nasdaq SPAC listing being proposed for late 2026 / early 2027, rather than the MKAR SPAC which will happen in the next two months. The comparison with REEcycle shows just how much Hypromag USA could be valued at given that a 50tpa company is being listed at a $600m valuation. Our first plant in Texas will do over 1.5ktpa, so 30x and comes on the back of the tech being proven in the UK and Germany.

Well if you were delighted to buy back at 35p, then you obviously have a decent amount of confidence in the prospects! Put it this way, we only need a few parts of the business to succeed to make serious money from here. If all our plans come off then Hannam's target of £2.40 per share on a fully diluted basis should be achievable, potentially by the end of next year.

Yes, while I've cheered up quite a bit since the placing was announced, I think the company will need to deliver to their milestones to rebuild confidence with the market and receive less of a discount to NPV of existing and planned projects. Thankfully we should have a market valuation for MKAR in less than two months, which should be more optimistic / positive than the UK market, given the way American markets work and the fact they haven't been burned by discounted placings.

Depends on your definition of big rise? We're up over 25% from the placing price, and this is only our third day of trading with the placing shares on the market. The Germany news was welcome, but behind schedule and not with full operations until the end of the month it seems. The grant is great, but it's about 2% of current market cap all in. Then remember that UK market was down yesterday due to ceasefire / Iran talks concerns. So I think a 26% increase is pretty helpful in that environment personally.

As for the big trades, this feels like placing shares being sold on at a premium to parties who missed out on their full allocation in the placing. Clearly certain institutions (perhaps including MM's) have taken advantage of what they knew was a cheap oversubscribed placing to secure shares that they had confidence they could shift on at a 25% profit, not bad for a few days work. We have churned through around 40m in volume since the placing was announced, with the total number of shares placed slightly below that level. I think we'll be through the churn fairly soon, but am encouraged that these big trades are happening in the low 40's as opposed to the mid 30's.

Yep, it most definitely does, price was 40.5775p. There was a 400k sell a minute before at 40.184p, which proves the point.

Well over 10m traded yesterday, highest volume day since July 18th.

I think you are quite likely to be right that we will get matched grant funding for further German capex spend, but nothing has been confirmed as yet. There is too much money sloshing about at the minute for us to miss out on matched funding, and the guys have proved to be pretty savvy in this regard, so I doubt that they will miss a trick this time.