Customer Relationships Key to Graphite Success

Mining Weekly reported on a talk given at the Australia-based Paydirt Graphite conference by Jason Chesters, a resource analyst at Patterson Securities. Chesters emphasized that graphite companies should focus less on flake size and grade, and more on whether they’ll actually be able to sell the material that they’re planning to produce.
As quoted in the market news:

“The recent project and corporate failures in the graphite sector have given investors pause as the market comes to better understand the added complexity and additional attributes required in a good graphite project.
“Customer relationships and product qualification is essential.” He noted that ultimately, the opportunity existed for a number of new graphite projects producing a required range of products, to be successfully developed to fill future demand growth.
Chesters said a successful new graphite project was less about size and grade, and more about flake graphite deposit, flake size distribution, product purity, deposit location and infrastructure, timeframe to production and above all, customer relationships.
“There is just one real question and that is, can you sell what you produce?” he said.

Click here to read the full Mining Weekly report.