good morning sir,
These questions are not mine, because I still got the faith in your firm.
On the forum there are wild speculations about why the stock is falling continously. Is somebody attempting to take over the firm? Is RWC completely selling off there remaining 10%? Is there a problem with the creditline? Will the factory not be ready in time or are there rising problems with that project? As I specified, these are not my questions but people are really getting nervous and I hope You can give an explanation to their questions...
sincerely yours
Kris
Dear Kris,
Thanks for your email. Although I would not normally comment on speculation or rumors, I did want to reply to your mail to set your mind at rest given the volatile trading activity in recent days.
With regards to RWC, they remain very supportive of AMG. They chose to only sell half of their 20% shareholding as they wish to continue to share in the significant future upside, resulting partly from our Lithium project (as many analysts have indicated publicly already). As part of the sell-down, they also agreed to a 180 lock-up period, meaning they cannot sell any more of their shares until May 2017 at the very earliest.
In terms of Lithium, our project is proceeding exactly as planned. We press released the signing of an EPC contract for the turnkey delivery of our lithium spodumene plant a few weeks ago. In recent weeks, Lithium prices estimates have increased (Roskill update – please see below) further strengthening our conviction around the project.
Roskill Lithium view: SQM reported record revenues for its lithium division in Q3 and 9M, with sales more than doubling to US$338M y-on-y for 9M and almost tripling to US$145M y-on-y for Q3. Sales volumes were 12.1kt (carbonate and hydroxide) for Q3 and 35.2kt for 9M, suggesting annual volumes (extrapolated to 47kt for 2016) may come close to capacity (48ktpy). The company sees annual demand rising 12-13% in 2016; this is ahead of Roskill’s revised 7.3% growth and would take demand to almost 200kt LCE (matching Roskill’s projected supply figure and removing the expected oversupply).
With regards to the other rumors, I would prefer not to comment specifically, but I can assure you they are simply rumors.
In terms of current trading, we have seen a number of non-fundamental investors (Quant investors, driven by algorithms) selling large blocks of shares in recent days. Our banks and analysts believe that this activity is driven by the need to take profits prior to a number of significant events in December – i.e. the Italian Constitutional Referendum on Dec 4th and the US Fed Meeting on December 14th. This trading activity has had a detrimental effect on our share price in recent days, but it is a short-term effect, and unfortunately nothing which we (AMG Management) can control as you can appreciate.
I hope this is helpful.
Best regards,
Steve
Steve Daniels
Senior Vice President Corporate
AMG Advanced Metallurgical Group N.V.