| | | Enjoyed meeting many friends and like minded investors today at the ZEN booth.
AE, Dr Chahar, Peter Wood and Dr. Conly were all on hand to discuss ZEN.
AE had to leave twice for meetings, one of those meetings was with a federal minister, he would not say which. He says there has been many discussions with both government levels lately. They had made some good strides with the Progressives when they were in office but had to start over with the federal Liberal government. He said that the bureaucrats are the same and that the provincial counter parts have been helping get the new federal ministers up to date but it is a process.
We speculated among our group that all these political meetings lately and a meeting with a minister on a Sunday could have something to do with the Federal Budget out in 2 weeks...We wait and see if we are right. I also took it that some of the delays the last few months were due to this change in government.
Dr. Chahar talked at length about the metallurgical process. He said scaling up what they are doing will not present any significant difficulties, that they have had good success at the pilot plant level and it is relatively simple engineering work to scale it up. He said what they managed to do at Conoco Phillips was much more challenging and that they were successful. We asked how the process without the caustic bake was going but he said this was not public info so he could not comment on that.
AE confirmed he went to Japan and that things went very well over there. They got similar feedback from there as they have from other companies. However, he admitted that there is a cultural difference and that the Japanese are very methodical in their approach. Even though they were one of the first to sign NDA's, their protocols are very strict and it takes a long time for them to make a decision. The Canadian Embassy in Japan warned him this was the case but that once they made a decision to move forward, they are extremely loyal partners and that it was worth the time to work with them. How close are we to a deal with a Japanese company? From my perspective, it is impossible to tell but it could be any day now to a year or more from today.
AE confirmed that they now have over 40 NDA's, with some of the newer ones coming from the US. These companies started after the Japanese but are more aggressive in how they do business, quite a contrast to the Japanese. ZEN keeps working with most of these companies as many are potential JV partners/Take over types.
He said most off takes are not worth the paper they are written on and so does not believe ZEN will go this route. He believes one of these companies will step forward and either JV with us or out right buy us out. Tried to press him on timelines and he said he no longer plays those games. It will happen when it happens. However, from his body language, I believe there is no doubt in his mind that this will be a mine. It is jut a question of when and how it will happen.
I asked about funding, would we see a PP at these prices. He said they are working on many avenues to raise money, none of them are the PP route at this time. He is the biggest share holder and wants the minimum amount of dilution like the rest of us he pointed out.
I asked about the difference in price between our PEA and CCB's. He said that Roskill calculated a number and then discounted that number and provided the discounted number to RPA. RPA then discounted again to what we saw in the PEA. The true value for our graphite will be somewhere between the 2 PEA numbers.
He closed out our little meeting around 5:15pm by saying he has never been so happy/confident about ZEN as he is right now. Take that for what it's worth.
There is probably more details that will come back to me tomorrow (when I am less tired) so may post again but that was the big lines of discussions that I and others heard today.
I personally am very happy holding ZEN and fully confident that we will all be rewarded for our patience.
Choo Choo,
Glorieux |
|
