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Beijing moves to curb price speculation, hoarding and unfair competition in lithium battery market
• China is encouraging lithium battery producers to sign longer-term contracts to stabilise supply chains. (Bloomberg)
• The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is also calling on lithium battery producers to ramp up output and avoid ‘vicious competition.’
• Lithium battery companies will be punished for hoarding and price speculation on the lithium battery market – could lead to 5-years in a correction camp!
• The statement described the ‘supply chain of the domestic lithium battery industry experiencing a serious imbalance between supply and demand.’
• The Ministry is also looking to ‘strengthen supervision and inspection to ensure the supply of high-quality lithium battery products.’
The statement is a green light for Chinese companies to sign-up and acquire new lithium production around the world.

HY, thanks, that explains quite a bit. Also it looks like dual share classes, all the senior voting shares are in the hands on one shareholder, the remaining B shares are held by shareholders, but with sub-ordinated rights. Never a good sign. And there appears to be quite a bit of legal kak happening between the company and Tanz authorities over some convertible pref shares, going back years. Also not ideal. No wonder it's trading where it is.

The only problem with comparing to ORC is that their valuation is so ridiculously poor, hopefully not a sign for AEX..!
12 month revenues of $111m, quarterly (!) EPS of $0.57, and a share price of C$ 4.80. Yields 8.4% on a PE of 3. Can't all be due to 'country risk', are they about to run out of gas?
Must be one of the only very profitable gas producers this year who's share price is down.
Likely candidate to go private?

The last quarterly production update in September, the AISC (all in sustaining cost) for producing a ton of tin was > 29k/ton. Overheads, energy, downtime etc, all pushing costs higher. Selling at $18k/ton, there's your negative cash flow. A month of that and my guess is a loss of $6/700k, multiply by 12, and that's a lot of the recent cash raise gone just to subsidize production costs for a year. It's why the cost of finance for the company is so high and there's no mention yet of the bank loan completing.
Like i've said before, ATM gambled early in the year on the tin price staying around $35k/ton in order to finance the expansion/drilling program/lithium pilot plant - that hasn't worked out, hence the need to raise finance to cover these costs, and subsidize production costs. It's a cash crunch, pure and simple, if the tin price rallies, and production costs come down with the added scale, all well and good, but hope is not a strategy, in my book.

This is positive news, in that the project which has dominated their time for the last 12 months is complete, and the company can now focus on what will make the real returns, i.e the lithium pilot plant, and hopefully, full Li production.

Expanding tin production at a time when it is costing the company $10k per ton to produce and sell it doesn't really do it for me, or the company's cash flows. AV doesn't get a pat on the back from me for doing his job, why would you think that way? He's there to create shareholder value, and to exceed the pretty low bar he's set himself. So far this year, that hasn't happened.

It's still very much jam tomorrow from AV..

Can't see that happening V1per, it will be acquired before it sinks to those depths.
Asset is too big/valuable, my guess is the current radio silence is due to prolonged issues with the financing, and the likelihood of talks with potential bidders.
Nothing on the phase 1 expansion, due to be completed in September. Q3 financials are going to be awful, losing $10k+ on each ton of tin sold, and 3 weeks of no production whilst the expanded plant is integrated. Eating through the cash from the share placing and still no news on the lithium pilot plant.
More convinced than ever that this ends up with a takeover approach.

JB was a dud at Aminex, screwed up it's only producing asset, left (forced out of) the company in tatters and having to farm-out 2/3 of it's key asset to survive. Not an operational oilman by any stretch of the imagination. If he he is kept away from the operational side, SDX might have a chance, but any claims about a strong track record are fictional..

Thanks McH, so 140mmscfd is going to be in the region of $180m/per annum. And Aminex's share of this is 25%, with practically no costs to cover for production.
And the revenues for the 60mmscfd now look like they start kicking in during Q1 '2024, 12 months earlier than expected yesterday. The NPV of the cashflows for that year alone should actually mean that the share price goes up on this news.
I'd question the logic of anyone selling today.
Be interesting to get a 5 years DCF calculation on Aminex revenues from 2024 onwards.

Can someone put a value on 60 million standard cubic feet per day of gas please? And 140...
Thanks!
PD

Apparently the rest of the financing package is with ‘legal and approvals’. I’d dispute the claim in the article that things are happening ‘very quickly’ - seriously AV, enough of the BS, start delivering.

Tin inventories slide following year-long jump that cratered prices
• LME tin stocks have fallen 12.5% after hitting 2-year peaks in September.
• Inventories had climbed 700% from lows in October 2021.
• Soaring inventories and weaker demand outlook has seen tin prices fall over 60% from peaks in March.
• Chinese buyers have ramped up tin imports in recent months as Indonesia has increased warnings of an export ban.
• Tin smelting producers in major Chinese region Yunnan have been hit by power rationing, weighing on prices.
• Soldering companies, the main end users of tin, had lowered demand outlook this month.
• Tin prices have been on a wild ride over the past two years, with supply bottlenecks sending physical premiums to $6,500/t in February 2021 on rock-bottom stocks.
• Prices have now settled around the $18,500/t mark. The pre-covid average price from 2012-2019 was $19,667/t.

With tin now back at $18k ton, the sooner the better. Really don't understand the lack of any material progress here, tons of lithium lying around in waste heaps, the stuff's already out of the ground! AV's tortoise approach really puzzles me..

Orange trust was once one of the largest shareholders in Bushveld, and still has 5%. They followed AV into ATM as a founding investor, and have shown immense loyalty imo to fund a placement at 5p. They’re not a charity, so clearly see many multiples of return potential. Orion will reduce their holding % as and when we hear that this and the bank loan have completed.
Wasn’t the expanded phase 1 plant meant to be fully commissioned by the end of September?

Happy, an interesting comparison is the relative performance of ATM, Alphamin and Atlantic Lithium over the past 12 months.
Alphamin is a pure copper play, sitting on one of the world's largest and higher purity tin deposits, with a low production cost per/ton. It has a PE of just 7 and yields 9% with a mkt cap of £500m and is very profitable. It has actually fallen 37% in the past year.
ATM has fallen 22% in the same period, depsite being much less profitable, and with higher production costs and lower tin % purity in it's confirmed resource.
Atlantic is up 80% despite it just being at the feasability and pre-production stage, although it does have clear vision on funding to production.
The closer we get to actual Li production, given current prices and demand for both metals, the more ATM should re-rate towards the higher valuation being given to Li producers. That should have happened by now, but ATM's, or the market's failure, to understand the combined potential of it's operation is why it's valuing it as a tin producer only. Couple with the current uncertainty that it has achieved the full fund raise it has promised to the market. Some clarity on this, and that the tin expansion circuit is actually now fully commissioned, would be helpful. Otherwise I see the SP drifting further and heading below 4p.

Happy, well..
1. Tin price back at $40k/ton, which would see it there pretty quick. In fact, with expansion of phase 1 output complete, coupled with ore sorting and cost savings, $35k might do it. Maybe less..
2. Actual progress towards Lithium production. All we've seen so far is efforts to re-rate the share price on the basis that Li exists on the licenses, but without much success. Proving they can separate it, coupled with projections of output rates and confirmation of the resource size would easily get the SP above 7p, and that should now happen within the next 6-12 months. The pilot plant was meant to be ready this quarter..
3. A bid for the company would obviously get there sooner, and be well above this price. Don't discount it, once all the participants in this fundraise have got their stakes in place.

I wondered if they were the party that voted against the AGM resolution on directors and employees share options a few weeks ago, similar size holding. Clearly a significant shareholder isn't happy with the company's desire to increase options significantly, especially after a highly dilutive fundraising.
H&P also issued an update note on the drilling results yesterday, pretty much a damp squib, only thing of interest is they have removed their target price for ATM from their research. Previously it was 25p by March 2023. Now they don't quote anything. What you get for cutting them in on the fees for the fundraise as a bookrunner, they drop their price target...

Upper edge of this rising channel in the short term looks like 1.50 area...
https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/AMINEX-PLC-4002512/charts/

Thanks for posting C1. I guess the difference is that their AISC was $13,200/ton for the last quarter, so strongly ebitda +ve even when selling at $22k/ton. That's where we need to be - the expansion should help lower production costs per ton, but we don't see the real benefits until the Li is being sold and we drive costs down to zero.
Interestingly, the share price for both companies has fallen by the same ytd, -30%, although AFM is listed in CAD.
I hope we hear that expanded plant has been fully commissioned soon, that the rest of the finance package has been confirmed, and that the resource drilling programme is complete, this seems to have been going on for ages.
ATM listed 5 years ago this month, the Li production idea has been in pay for 4 of these, and yet we don't even have a complete picture of the potential resource yet, or an idea of when the pilot plant may be built, yet alone producing meaningful Li.
There are literally tons of Li sitting above aground in the waste ore piles that are massive potential revenues for the company. It doesn't make sense to me that this hasn't been fast-tracked over the past 2 years.

Talk is cheap, he needs to pull his finger out and deliver. Despite the vast resource ATM sits on, the market still does not get the revenue potential, or gives ATM the valuation it deserves.
That's squarely at AV's door, the strategy he's employed to date and the poor communication he's provided, directly or indirectly, to the market. ATM is trading at 20% of comparable valuations.
I'd say it's more of a once in a lifetime opportunity for him to actually deliver on the vast potential here. The recent investors at 5p would probably agree on that!

it's significantly higher than that currently, from the Sep 15th production update:

Operating costs for Uis Mine increased to US$25,245 (unaudited) per tonne of tin. This can be attributed mainly to lower production volumes of tin, additional ramp-up costs to ensure operational readiness for the expanded production, inflationary pressure of high fuel prices which increased by 16% QoQ, and higher maintenance costs due to unplanned stoppages. Except for higher fuel prices, all of the aforementioned cost factors are regarded as extraordinary events which are expected to be resolved during the next quarter. The Company also expects the forward-looking unit costs to improve with the realisation of higher production volumes from the Phase 1 Expansion Project. Steady state production for the expanded operation is projected for Q4 FY2023.