Hi all,
While avz is my main play, I do follow a few other lithium companies too, with a small parcel in some (carn EMH!). Lately I've been thinking about European Lithium, who have signed a deal with a Saudi company for a 50/50 joint venture on a processing plant.
This post isn't meant to be a comparative analysis or anything, more just musing and speculation on how this as a reference point could hint at future possibilities for AVZ. EUR's contribution to the JV is basically feedstock, with he Saudis paying for the plant. The mine is in Austria, and like most others it's a teacup pig compared to Manono. Not exactly close to Saudi Arabia, and not exactly a world-class deposit. IMO the Saudi's aren't getting into this to support their car industry, they want to keep owning the energy industry. And I mean OWN it. So arrangements like the one they have with EMH is going to be how they go about it, I expect EUR is just the first of many deals to be done.
So my musings are twofold.
1 - What does this tell us about the sort of arrangement that AVZ might end up with, be it with China or someone else
2 - Is Saudi Arabia going to to get involved with Manono? I know it's been speculated about on here before, and they have had trade discussions with DRC. They got money like the Chinese, more 'flexible' on certain host country attributes than the USA, and need to build themselves new industries. Even if DRC still insisted on processing happening locally, if SA wants to control a lithium OPEC then they need control of manono, regardless of where the product gets processed.
IMO they could make a good 3rd party to balance out the Chinese.
I'm not in the weChat group, so don't know if anything related to SA is in the rumors circulating around there, this is just my own speculation.
(Also - don't begrudge them having a private chat alongside an anonymous public message board. People have varying degrees of both effort, involvement and exposure/risk here. And if someone accidentally says 'thank-you' on here instead, toughen the fuk up and ignore it. You are no worse off that someone else knows something that you don't)
So,
While I think probably China has their teeth sunk deep enough into manono/DRC that they will also eventually end up stumping up the cash to move it forwards, now that SA has started making moves I would not be surprised if they came out with an even bigger dump of cash to push China aside and get into the project. AVZ mines SA pays for the processing plant and China buys all the output? We'll see.
<br>Le groupe Chinois
<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ZIJIN?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc^tfw">#ZIJIN</a> avait IMPOSÉ dans une lettre à la <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/COMINIERE?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc^tfw">#COMINIERE</a> une coentreprise où elle aurait 71% et l'État Congolais
