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 thank you I'm Charlotte McLeod with the investing News Network and here today with me is Larry Smith founder of core consultants and CEO of molten Metals thank you so much for joining me online today it's great to see you thank you Charlotte for having me really nice to be speaking with you and because it's our first time talking you have a really interesting background of how you got into the mining sector so I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about that as well as the work that

you're doing now at core Consultants uh yeah sure um well I guess the joke's on me because all efforts to avoid the mining sector and now there's been about 17 18 years I've been in the mining sector uh I started to studying chemistry in South Africa and that's a one-way Street into the mining sector so then I try to deviate go and become a teacher that would that was a very short-lived career went into Finance in Asset Management on the buy side and my first day there they said would you would you

like to do the mining industry since you have a background in chemistry I was like nope I'll do everything else thank you and literally I did everything else as I was a food analyst I was a sugar analyst gaming I could tell you all the the rates of uh of a relative will for for um gaming stocks and eventually because I was in South Africa the chief investment office at the time said look if you want a career in South Africa with the top 40 stocks are all mining at least the time it was the case

um I suggest you start analyzing the mining industry um otherwise your career here will be short-lived and that that's really how I got started first on the junior mines at the time in South Africa there was a lot of black economic empowerment Minds that were coming up and not another many of them are not the ones that have survived were actually pretty mature senior companies today um and that's how I really got into it and I joined a diversified fund in mining and obviously a lot of work in

the Baltic region and in Africa and I never stopped that's quite funny so despite all best efforts you ended up in mining and one thing that I also found interesting is you're actually in some very Niche sectors very early on like lithium Cobalt Rare Earth so I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the process of learning about these industries that we typically see as very Niche building connections and getting started there uh yeah sure so I mean I suppose firstly my my background in chemistry

um doing a BSC and really reading a lot of journals helped um and that was always the way that's actually the way I always look at an industry as I start seeing what's coming through in Academia it doesn't always end up on the commercial side but very often it does um and then very early on because I was working mostly in the copper belt um we had an asset that we had monetized and um you always think that these decisions are are made based on on very rational um ideas and a lot of thorough

investigation but it's not always the case sometimes it really is people that pull it apart and in in the case where we were there was two partners at the helm that were not getting along so the idea was to basically get him to buy out a copper Cobalt assets and then use the money and deploy it somewhere else and I was trying to evaluate whether that would be a good idea and what that something else was and I was asked to look at lithium and that was back in 2007 um and I suppose the reason for lithium

was because it was there was an interest at this point in South America and there was a lot of backwards and forwards and looking at the iron ore players but iron always coming off at the time so um water was very high and then it came off later and so so lithium was a viable option and it seemed better than Cobalt for a variety of reasons but Cobalt took a very long time to to take off um and it was very much a code product for us so it was coming off anyway but we weren't really Niche into that that

sector it was more around the copper um and so that that's how I started to get into lithium and again I started reading the academic papers what does it take to process lithium um and actually from the academic papers there's a lot that which went into application you can start to phone these these uh professors and process engineers and um very early on in my career I don't know to remember they were Pedro pivot logic the extraction of lithium from brine resources in Chile and we've remained

industry friends but he basically taught me everything I needed to know about hard rock and brines and and that's really how I start off analyzing any any industry and why why lithium at the time and really seem to silicon one minor metal um you can know about the risk you start to learn what goes together so rare earth came afterwards and I and I then started going to Hong Kong for for Cobalt conferences and instead of becoming a speaker there and getting to meet other people in those Industries

okay I think that's a really good point because I think people tend to think about all these minor Metals as totally separate things but as you're saying you can learn about one of them and you start to know about all of them so we have an idea now of your background I want to talk about some of the things you're doing right now so as I mentioned your CEO of molten Metals this is an exploration company focused on antimony and Tin I want to ask you about antimony because I think it's a metal that people

probably don't know too much about so if you could give us some details on that and what supply and demand Dynamics look like right now uh yeah sure well antimony actually is one of the oldest Metals known to man it was even used in ancient Egypt for makeup but today it's mostly used as a heat retardant and what's putting a lot of pressure on the market is not only existing applications but future applications um as regards batteries and you've got to start to look at all these all these

minor Metals I guess with you whether it's Cobalt lithium tantalum antimony they all have very specific properties that lend itself to batteries or lend itself to a particular industrial application rather than a store of values or a gold is a store of value but these minor metal sympathy are not stores of value that they're they're in Industry use so specifically on antimony what what you have is about 50 of it was close to 60 is used as a heat retardant some of that is used as anti-corrosive

properties and for hardening bullets now the reason for those um heat retardants is because as you scale antimony does act as a cooling agent so it is a metal that does act as a natural insulation so that if you now talking about batteries and you're putting very volatile matter in a battery you're contemplating lithium under your current and it's not these small minus the trend used to be let's take a brick phone and make it into a little portable device now we're going the other way and we're going all right

let's take the same lithium battery scale it up and put it in your car um take a small battery that might be used to power something scale it up and put it on an electric wood and once you start to scale something from laboratory to commercial to to mass production you start to release a lot of heat and those properties which might not cause any trouble start to cause tremendous trouble so antimony has got its use as a heat retardant which means that as you start to scale these batteries into Mass

battery so it's what you really need because the Holy Grail of decarbonized future is if we can actually take renewable energies and store it harness it and store it and use it when we need it so when the sun doesn't shine when the wind doesn't blow we have it and that needs batteries at a huge stay and for that there is entertainment right and there are so many critical Metals as you said where you know this green energy change the electric vehicle Revolution is really driving demand so I

wondered if you can talk a little bit more about you know with antimony is there Supply available to meet this groin demand what do the numbers look like there if you can expand a little on that yeah so it's a very very niche market it's around 170 000 tons a year and that market is broadly in Balance currently it's pretty much in deficit um and and the way the supply chain works is you'll have your your rule your raw and terminal feed as or and then typically either or or concentrate will

get sent to a roaster and there's a couple of Roasters outside of China there's there's a major one in Oman there's U.S antimony um in the states and they would then produce either and so many trioxide um or into mini metal the majority of it is in too many trioxide and then that is the that is really what will be used if you've got very very high grade or some of which it does not have to be roasted it can actually be used as a concentrate directly in applications depending what

that application is for um but where does it actually come from oh gosh about 70 is produced in China and roasted in China and then you've got Russia um and but Russia was actually at some point of quite a big supplier into Oman but they built its own dedicated to Roasters and very little materials actually coming out of Russia um it's not even going to China it's actually been kept for its own purposes um then you had Zimbabwe but Zimbabwe is not a good producer or or a big producer

at the moment um and in South Africa which was actually a lot of a lot of antimony occurs with gold so in the case of South Africa it was a gold and too many mine but it now runs much too deep so that's not commercial at the moment so really you've got not much coming out of China from an industrial industrialized Source you do have um a lot of artisanal miners it's more scale Miners and the reason is there are several Commodities Metals I mean tantalum is one of them where which lends itself to artisanal mining or

small scale mining because it does have use and value um if the grades run high enough and you can mine it on the scene and and that is true for a lot of them too many deposits that's true for and too many deposits in Pakistan in Burma in Iran um in Turkey in Bolivia and and really that's what was happening they're mining on the scene they're taking up hybrid they're hand sorting it um for high grade or in the north side effect so it's not not much in terms of industrialized Supply coming through

right and based on that you can kind of start to see why we might want to find some new sources of that I want to briefly mention 10 as well this is a metal that molten Metals is also focused on so tin is probably more familiar for investors of course we know about tin cans but again this is a critical metal that has growing use in the battery sector so if we could just look at tin supply and demand what you see in the market there that feels compelling actually aluminum cans but um yeah so so I take your point look it

is much more of a mature Market it's almost double the size of antimony it's about 350 000 tons yeah um most often goes into soldering and that that is still the case and a little bit used to go into lead acid batteries where the opportunity now with turn is concerned is um also in coating the anode for lithium ion batteries and again it will act as a cooling agent so it actually stabilizes the lithium anode and actually allows it to to react um much better and adds a lot of efficiencies uh to the battery so that's

what they're looking at for that so they expect the last figure I heard out of the 350 000 is they expect around from 24 000 to 60 000 tons required um over the next five years that was the last paper I read for to turn into battery specifically so again it's a question of where does it come from where are we going to get tin there has been recent investment into the sector um but but it's very challenging to find a high grade tin source that that is easy to mine and and also the question of where is it

where's the deposit so one of our biggest deposits Malaysia Indonesia a DRC so it's not easy to find a credible tin Source that's high grade amenable to effective Mining and um in a nice jurisdiction right and of course with molten Metals you're trying to answer the question of where we will get supply for these Metals I believe the company has Assets in both Canada and Slovakia so maybe you could talk about the company's goals for 2023 and what you hope to accomplish this year

yeah um so I guess the there's some similarities to the product to the to those minds and and several differences um just in the way one goes about mining in those two different jurisdictions but um the first thing we're going to be doing is we'll have to do a capital raise um and a lot of that money will go into developing um the Slovakian acidatory Rover the reason is because there there's a lot more information known about those at those assets than there is in Canada Canada if that one was lost producing and about

I suppose during the first world war um its use wasn't hardening bullets and it was discovered around the 19th to the 19th century so that that's as far as Canada's gone it hasn't been mined in terms of a modern method in recent times but there are large um stockpiles there and there are tailings which which would be extremely interesting to look at and possibly process and then have a look at the underground deposits and how we can start proving that up so that that's Canada

um in Slovakia things are a little bit different because it used to be owned by the Soviets during the Soviet Union um Slovakia was of course part of the Soviet Union before it became part of the European Union and the way they used to attack their antimony assets was they used to build edits then as a collective so if Russia wanted antimony at the time they would build these edits they would calculate the resource as they went along building these adults detail them if Russia wanted the the antimony then they would

start to extract intimately as they went along if they did not want the antimony there because there was no need from from Central Russia then they would close um that that particular addict which they had built so what you have is these long tunnels for those who don't know what an added is of information of that's almost like the mind is almost built for you and initially they started closing those with Gates then that led to a lot of theft and then they started exploding um those adults so you have this

rockfall and what you have to do effectively is you have to open that you have to start removing the Rocks reinforce the added and then start going in and reconfirming what has been done and because you're basically twinning the sample you're basically checking against the old maps and making sure that it's there it's a lot easier and a lot cheaper to get into production to get a reserve statement firstly and to get into production so that's why a lot of the efforts will be concentrated there

okay really interesting so that'll be something to watch going forward into this year we've taken kind of a deeper dive into the metals the company is focusing on but of course as you've been alluding to there are so many minor medals that have a big role in basically the future as we move to reward A Greener future so I wonder what other minor medals would you highlight for investors to pay attention to right now there's a lot of there's a lot of I suppose there's a lot of Demand right

now for tantalum a lot of companies looking at that um I think a lot of these companies just they'll all have their day in the sun I guess um Rare Earth has come back but I I don't I don't see how they can delivers make too much money in real Earth it all kind of gets made by the refineries um a lot of outside of minor Metals you have a lot of uranium uh come back into my a lot of clean fuels alternative fuels I mean even thorium is has now got a market I mean that used to be a complete nasty

um you know your mind was dead if you had too much thorium now there's actually a market um for this so I think a lot of these things will just play a role in in the green economy tungsten I mean again the price is quite low for tanks if it's at the point where people want to open up a mind just for the tungsten but you know tungsten is also um going to be needed so yeah it's it's a different world it's certainly a Metals focused world now compared to only call only oil but that

will take time I will take time they think there's still place for hydrocarbons too right and the other thing that I want to touch on is supply chain security which has become a really big issue due to cover 19. Russia Ukraine war I think governments are really starting to pay attention to making sure that they do have these stable Supply chains so my question for you is do you think that countries around the world are doing enough or what could they do better oh no I definitely don't think they're

doing enough at all um and I'll and I'll tell you why and this is something that I've thought about a lot a lot a lot that um firstly they don't get involved early enough a lot of what if a lot of a lot of the um critical medal um how do I said funds that are available is you have to show um ni43 101 you have to show a joke statement you have to show all these things but you don't have the money up front to to actually produce these things um so that leaves opportunity for a

higher risk investor in China to come along and give you that money to get your your nr43-101 or to get some kind of knowledge around the resource what do they want in return they want off take so something you look around and you've got your best deposits which you do not know where your best deposit are not owned by the people where you want them to be and and that that becomes a problem so I think we're we're mining has got to learn a lot to learn from the high-tech sector actually is if you take sort of the

Silicon Valley the high tax rate so you had a lot of um funders come forward in the beginning for pre-seed rounds when pre-seed runs What I Call pre-ni43-101 Now Greenfield not even Greenfield exploration just pre-ni43-101 and there isn't enough funds out there for precede and that leaves you vulnerable as a country that that's the first thing and a lot of these a lot of these um if you actually like drill into the funds they've got to be matched so they'll give you 20 million if you want 20 million but

they've got to be but you've got to be able to match it for 20 million and a lot of these deposits don't require 20 million you can get an attorney mind into production in five million you don't need 20 million and suddenly you've got and so many or suddenly you've got a stream of tin you don't need these huge deposits in order to make a dent in your supply chain um because you started from such a low base theft anything you get is is going to be something in the right direction

but if you don't stop putting up that higher risk capital um and that higher risk Capital doesn't come in Friendly hands or because or it becomes too expensive so that that leaves you with management team that are like well they're taking off my half my company is owned by somebody else now you know it's too diluted for me they're nobody's nobody's engaged but if you come with a reasonable amount and tire risk capital and you don't take that much so it doesn't dilute

management to that extent then you've got an Engaged management team and you've got a potential for for a mine to go forward and the watch is doing that very badly okay I think those are some great points so really we're seeing countries make it harder than it has to be to get these assets into production I also want to touch on the retail investor side because I think that people will look at these Metals markets that are smaller they're more opaque and they may be a little bit confused about how to get

into them and you've been telling us you know if you if you start to know one that makes it a lot easier to know the rest of them so I wonder for retail investors who are looking at something like the topics we've been discussing what would your advice be for them if they want to get involved and put money into a company like this I think there's a there's a lot of momentum trading a lot around the retail investors but I feel like for the service investors who then there should be a lot more homework than than what is

given and I mean for me I can only speak for me but again I come from an academic background and and I I at one point I knew the periodic table with all its numbers by heart so that that's just how much of a nerd I am and if you start to know the periodic table then you know the properties and what occurs with what because it's actually very detailed the way the way period of tables ordered so if you start to look there then you can say all right well what else is going to happen what else is going to happen what

else is going to happen that's why they've all got these uses and batteries because and if you start looking where they occur in the periodic table they share very similar properties so it becomes obvious as to why so that that's sort of on a macro level as to how you can start to get to know these Commodities very quickly um and all these Commodities all these metal markets have very few drivers so if you can identify the top driver then you know which direction it's going to go

so if you're going to predict any sort of metal and I and I don't come from a I mean I haven't done share price prediction in in many many years with a lot of what I've done um sort of in the last 16 17 years is metal price prediction and really what you're looking for is um you want to know your magnitude and you want to know Direction so it doesn't matter if I could turn price goes to 28 or 29 you really want to know the magnitude any one another Direction then you want to know how much

can you make money so I think that's how you can start to look at these um materials then you start to look at who the seniors are what what concerns they might have to kill what obstructions they have to get into production most of the time if they're um if they say they're going to take three years add on another three years so then you can start to get your supply curve right um yeah and and so that's that's how you start to to look at these things as to what can be the next big mover in in the

commodity space and then look at the academic papers as to what they were because that details what the uses were where the deposits were found what were the problems with those deposits because those deposits come up and again and again and again and again at a different brand especially with Junior minus right okay so you got to do your research but it does sound that you can break this down into steps and that may make it easier for investors to get a handle on what's going on so you've

given us really a lot to think about but before I let you go I want to ask if you had any other final thoughts that you would share with our audience in terms of what in terms of in terms of investment in terms of anything that we've been talking about um I think like if you're going to look at it from an investment perspective I think you've got to take a step back and understand Commodities that a lot of these Commodities have their day in the Sun and based on where you are on the Curve

will determine where the next big idea is going to come from so like all too often I you know if I'm and a lot of companies come to me for um because they want they've got a shell and they want to take out a deposit so I can give you a nickel for every single person that goes we want a lithium deposit that's brown field that's more than a million answers that's at least pea and it's got to be in South America let me tell you something when they're all asking for that you've missed a boat

and I must say and that's not me predicting that lithium price is going to go down please don't mistake me like I'm not going to say that I'm just saying that that's not your next 1000 hitter because it's just done so it's your next then yeah okay makes a lot of sense well thank you so much for for coming on to talk today it was really great to get your perspective on all these different critical medals I think you helped us break it down in a way that hopefully people can understand a little bit

better how to address these markets so thank you very much thank you so much Charlotte thank you for having me of course and once again I'm Charlotte McLeod with the investing News Network and this is Larry Smith with core consultants and molten metals foreign