Hopper58 schreef op 10 maart 2022 20:03:
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Uit de laatste earnings conference:
Henk Veerman
Okay, clear. My third question is on your lithium. Yes, you stated again that you plan to -- at least, you are looking to potentially sell part of your lithium operations either to a third party or via an IPO. And in your comments, you stated that this might -- under all conditions, it should benefit shareholder value creation. Could you maybe provide some more color on how such a sale of a minority stake could or potentially could create shareholder value creation?
Dr. Heinz Schimmelbusch
We have our 5-year plan, which is very ambitious. But given our cash flow generation is well financed without any outside infusion, that's partly true for increasing cash flow contributions.
Now as we have stated, we have modules to go through, to build in the hydroxide area given the demand in Europe for hydroxide. And there are 5. And we are prospecting the first, and that is 20,000 tonnes each. And therefore, the execution of that exercise is very much dependent on resource availability.
And consequently, we are involved in various stages of negotiations and evaluation, exploration activities in the area of lithium resources. And these projects require partly substantial investments. And as we add those investments to our otherwise balanced 5-year plan, it is logical to think about how to finance those.
We have reduced our debt level, and we are not intending to increase our debt level strategically. And therefore, the question is, is there a very attractive expansion possibilities defined how you finance them, and logically, one alternative or the main alternative is to dilute on the lithium side and invest that money into the lithium side.
And that investment -- that strategy can only be done or should only be done if the value created by those investments out on -- out-dilute the dilution or overcompensate the dilution which you incur when you sell a portion. And that is the complicated evaluation which we are in. We approach this now on a very focused basis because we want to have this question behind us rather quickly in order to focus on execution and not be tied up into diligence and alternative organizational models. That's why we said we would announce that relatively quickly. Presently, we are discussing this with several financial institutions.