 Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Chris Reed of NeoMetals. How are you today, Chris? I'm very well, Tracy, yourself. Well, I'm great. And, Chris, what a pleasure it is to interview what is, you know, you're basically the leader in the Lithium market right now, and you've come such a long way in a short period of time. So let me just start by congratulating you on being up, what, 347% last year? Thank you very much. Yeah. I just have to correct that. There's probably one of the leaders in the junior Lithium market where we're not yet a producer, but looking forward to joining the ranks very soon. Well, yes. And thank you for clarifying that. And also, I'd like to congratulate you on rewarding your shareholders so you've just recently done a return to shareholders and an on-market share buyback. I'd love it if you'd start by telling our investor Intel audience how they'll be rewarded by being a shareholder at NeoMetals. Okay. Well, at NeoMetals, we've taken the opportunity and needed to sell down some equity to bring in China's leading Lithium producer, Gan Feng, as an off-tape partner and an equity partner in the project. So as we've sold down in two tranches so far, we've built up quite a good war chest. At the end of the month, it'll be about 68 million Australian dollars. Now, that's far in excess of what we need to retain, a prudent level of cash. So we are looking to return some of the cash to our shareholders. You don't want to give it or, you know, as we're coming into production, we want to give something that's potentially sustainable. So we're giving back two cents a share and then we are conducting an on-market buyback to sort of reduce the number of shares we've got on issue. So Chris, in addition to being a fantastic leader in the Lithium market right now, you were recently speaking at an event, actually it was our Technology Metal Summit, and you wrote that the stake is really in renewable energy storage, solar and wind when it comes to the Lithium market because there's all kinds of what do you call promoters out there right now. There's Lithium companies exploding left, right and center and I really love for you to comment further on that idea. Right, yeah, I think I said the stake was the renewable energy storage and Elon and the electric cars with the sizzle. In terms of the volume of Lithium, you know, we see the growth in the amount of Lithium battery or energy storage as a whole being really more driven from renewables as opposed to the electric car. Yes, the electric car it's got to compete against the more efficient fuel cars that we're getting now. You've got these small turbocharged diesel engines and they use a fraction of the fuel they used to. We still think electric and hybrids are very, very compelling. Certainly the Chinese committing to the electrification of transport and in a very short period of time going from perhaps a third of what the Americans produced to last year exceeding them and this year they could double or triple the electric car sales that the US do is very, very positive and it's caught the market in a short position. What we see is that as battery costs come down at the start of 2015 there are about 800 odd US dollars kilowatt hour of storage then after the power pack and the power wall announcement by Tesla it's down to 350 kilowatt hour for the residential US 250 kilowatt hour for the power pack which is the industrial 100 kilowatt hour storage pack. Each one of those packs is equivalent to more than a Tesla car. So the success of that launch was that they essentially took orders to fill the Gigafactory in two weeks. So the Gigafactory will have the demand there to take it at full production which is equivalent to 500,000 cars but we see that there's probably 100,000 worth of batteries coming out for cars the rest of it will be coming out for the power pack and the power wall and this phenomenon is not just limited to Tesla you know you drive the battery storage costs down to 250 bucks a kilowatt hour and you know you've bypassed the cost of the grid. I think Warren Buffett's NV Energy signed an agreement last year with First Solar in it for a 25 year solar battery array at a fully amortized cost of about 3.8 US cents a kilowatt hour. Now in Australia we pay probably 15 US cents a kilowatt hour so you know solar batteries and storage have got a far greater market than just the electric cars we believe I mean essentially the electric cars at this stage are for rich people. Think about what you know there's a billion people in Africa without reliable energy you can't ship them diesel and diesel generators but if you gave them a couple of panels and a battery you know then they're pretty much self-sufficient for power and that also goes for India where there's about 300 million people without reliable power and the government's committing $22 billion over the next couple years to fix that. Now when they were faced with taking telecommunications and telephone to the masses there they went mobile so think about this as mobile power you don't have to build big coal-fired power stations you don't have to build massive high-voltage transmission networks you know everyone is essentially energy independent so we see this as the biggest growth market in Lithium in terms of volume. Well speaking of growth market you had your most recent one of your most recent announcements was you made an off-take and equity investment with China's leading Lithium producer Ganpeng Lithium can you tell us more about this it sounds very exciting to me because they're the leading producer from China this sounds big yeah that's what's going on you know the market caps about you know three or four billion dollars depending on what the Shenzhen stock exchange is doing on on any one day they are the most diverse Lithium producer in China producing everything from Lithium metal, Lithium hydroxide, Lithium carbonate, buta Lithium which is used to stabilise rubber in car tyres and obviously the tyre industry in China is pretty big because it's the world's biggest automotive in market at the moment you know all the way through to pharmaceutical grade products so you know they are the fastest growing the most profitable company so we're very very proud to have them as a partner at Mount Marion you know we've signed a life of mine off-take with them we're currently doing a massive drill out with a view to increasing the resources and a new reserve around mid-year and hopefully we can consider a decision to increase production further from Mount Marion. So Chris we are delighted that you're going to be one of our prominent speakers so you'll be our lunch presenter during the clean tech and technology metals some of this is our fifth annual one and you know Jack Lipton is saying that you know we're going to be addressing the technology technology metals demand supply and demand in the clean tech revolution I just love to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah look I think it's got a super role to play. Lithium you know in everything from transport through to the renewable energy storage you know what it does you know it drives a lot of the other metals so you know lithium is only part of the battery it needs nickel cobalt manganese titanium it leads lots of other metals that we would call them transition metals to enhance the probability or the sorry the potential of the of the technology metals which is lithium you know they're very complimentary so you know it's it's good for everyone you know cheaper power, ergo means less costs and more projects can get built. Okay well Chris thank you so much for joining us today it was a pleasure to hear from you. Thank you very much Tracey you have a great night.