From LSE

By Earache
It's great to see the interest this news has created and thanks to all for digging through the numbers.

There was one thing I noticed which KC cleared up for me overnight as follows:

"One little thing that's confusing me but which I'm sure you can easily clarify is that on 19th December you announced "Additionally, recent optimisation test work has demonstrated the ability to reduce roast temperatures and duration which can result in significant cost savings both in CAPEX and OPEX". Today you've announced "Confirmation that a modest increase in roasting temperature significantly increase lithium recovery". Temperature movements appear to be contradictory or have I misunderstood?"

"No £ lower temperature means lower costs, but there is now a trade off with greater recoveries. Greater recoveries mean better economics all other things being equal. We will continue to tweak to get to the optimal place."

So it's a balancing act with a positive economic outcome either way and even more improvements to come. Our plan was always to create a flexible processing facility at Cinovec where production could respond dynamically to the demand and price fluxuations of the mineral markets, ie. LCE v. our other credits.

I think what we're also seeing here is an ability to play with recovery rates dynamically in response to the energy supply markets. If the price of leccy shoots up we can turn the heat down a bit to maintain our Opex / IRR balance which others may not be able to do. We can control our price competitiveness and profitability.

This is turning out to be a much more sophisticated operation than others who simply mine the ore and direct ship it overseas. I can't see them with anything like this level of flexibility in what will probably remain an ever changing marketplace with downward price pressures in the foreseeable future. This confirms that our choice of roasting process was the correct one.