Australasian Metals sees lithium prices over US$3,000: Eyes on drill targets

Neesha Seth (Presenter): Welcome back to Market Index. Qingtao Zeng, thank you for your time.

Qingtao Zeng (Australasian Metals): Thank you.

Neesha Seth: Qingtao, you're the managing director of Australasian Metals, a lithium, gold, and precious metals exploration company. Lithium is certainly a hot sector at the moment, and lithium prices have more than doubled in the past six months. Where do you see the lithium price moving to from here?

Qingtao Zeng: Actually, I'm a veteran in the lithium space. I've been through the last boom started in 2016, and then it's under the water around 2018, 2019, but this time, right now we are going up like this. I can say that the first boom, more driven by concept or speculations, and this boom is definitely driven by genuine demand from the downstream, in terms of the concentrated price. I run my private business, which is trading spodumene concentrate. I can say, according to the last Pilbara Minerals auction price, it's over 2000 US dollars per tonne, with enormous demand and limited supply. There's no new supply in short-term, the concentrated price will jump to over 3000 US dollars per tonne very quickly.

Neesha Seth: Australasian has benefited from these market conditions with the share price appreciating significantly in the past year. How do you distinguish A8G from the other juniors in this space?

Qingtao Zeng: If you look at the history, which we only listed May last year, we only have nine months history. Actually, how we gather the lithium ground is, the company pack the ground for free, with limited costs from the government. So we present an opportunity for our shareholders, which has exposure to potential lithium discoveries in central Northern Territory with limited cost. I think that's one of the reasons why market regard us highly.

Another thing is we have two major lithium converters in our register already. They cornerstone our last capital raising, and with them on board, our interests are in line with them. They only think we have a success when we deliver the products to the market, which is long-term vision, they're not a seller at all. So that's the reason I think, we have good register, we have process promising exploration ground, and we have a dedicated team with the right lithium experience in this space.

Neesha Seth: What is the plan for Australasian in the next three to six months?

Qingtao Zeng:  Our geologists, just to finish another company of fieldwork, they do surface mapping and rock chips, follow up the hot area, which we identified 1.6% lithium in the surface within the pegmatite outer crop. Nobody touched that before. So we find something and we are doing the follow-up programme to try to define the footprint of this potential mineralisation along the strike. But in the meantime, we engage a sophisticated geophysics team. They're doing some geophysics away for us to give us some profile in cross-sections. We know how long it along the strike and cross-section, give us some down deep concept. So the outcome of that programme will give us a potential volume, what we are looking at, that will help us to define our drilling target down the track. So I would think 2022 will be an exciting year for us.

Neesha Seth: Qingtao Zeng, managing director of Australian Metals, thank you for joining us on Market Index, and we look forward to seeing the progress of your organisation.

Qingtao Zeng: Thank you very much.