 Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Gavin Lockyer from Arafur Resources. How are you today Gavin? Good. Thanks, Tricey. It's always a pleasure and Gavin you've been doing a lot of traveling I know you were in Singapore recently and You know, I was looking at Dudley Kings North's Presentation he talked about the global rare earths industry being plagued by illegal production in China Can you tell us a little bit more about what happened in Singapore and whether or not you deem this to be a Real issue for Arafur are presently Yeah, Dudley's Dudley's comments were certainly very interesting and I think one of the statistics was that 40% of NDPR was actually coming from the illegal trade. So that's quite a quite a large and obviously significant figure I think it's quite evident that China is obviously doing the best they can to to clean up the industry But I think more importantly, there's probably needs to be a push from the customer side of things to ensure that the you know, the chain of custody of Where productions coming from? should perhaps be Coming into consideration and I think that was certainly combined with the Chinese Clant down on illegal production I think that will certainly help the rare earth industry outside of outside of China And and obviously a flow and effect to prices Of course, you know, one of the impacts of this particular issue has to do with pricing. Did they talk about solutions? Well, I think the Chinese are trying to obviously Secure supply for their own domestic demand and Pricing certainly has been a major factor more for more so from the supply side where we're hearing that Many Chinese producers are actually slowing down or stopping production or together at these prices So I think this will force more dramatic More dramatic Response maybe from the Chinese government in order to clamp down on that illegal mining even further But I'd suspect the next year a lot of that resolves itself just through natural attrition feet stop drying up for those illegal plants and as I said if External customers start to demand a bit more of a chain of custody And I think that will certainly help to drive pricing in the right direction for us Well speaking of the right direction your mineral resource update. Can you give us an overview? I think what's what was extremely pleasing about this member resource update was that it didn't cost us a cent in extra drilling It came about as part of our environmental work whereby we have to identify the waste rock that sits around the actual war itself and obviously when you're mining and You're mining in a radioactive environment. You don't want to be putting radioactive material Exposed at surface. So we we needed to carefully block diagram Every part of the of the resource area and our guys painstakingly went through a number of computer programming processes to to come up with a revised Waste model which inherently has also given us some significant upside in in resource So that's extremely pleasing So let me understand that correct You were able to revise these numbers while you were working on your environmental impact statement. Is that correct? sure when part of part of obviously your environmental impact statement has to address radiation and the host walk around no one's is radioactive as everybody knows and So when you're mining you don't want to be putting the more radioactive material exposed at surface You actually want that under benign material to help with your Radiation management processes and and so we had to do a significant modeling analysis of the waste rock and And this has inherently led to a improved resource for us. And what is the timeline for the completion? For the EIS we're looking to submit EIS with the authorities in the first quarter of next year that then goes through a public consultation process of about a month Any comments from public and or regulators will then have to be addressed by us in a subsequent submission So we would be looking for ultimate approvals towards the end of next year or third quarter of next year It's I should add though that along through this whole EIS process that we've been going through now for nearly 12 months We've engaged with the regulators We've actually taken regulators out to site to see what we're up to to show them the things that we're monitoring And they've been extremely supportive and to date. No major issues have been identified. So that's very pleasing Well, congratulations and speaking of that. You just had your AGM and I was Powering through your PowerPoint and I thought was interesting as you were talking about your letter of intent with OCI Company about your rare as separation plant. Can you give us Give those of us that were not present kind of an overview on the update that you provided Of course, we've been looking for quite some time now for a potential location for our offshore Or sorry our downstream rareth oxide separation plant The reason being is obviously we need a lot of hydrochloric acid predominantly to to strip the rare earths into their individual oxides and To transport hydrochloric acid to Central Australia is not very cost effective. So we've been searching globally over a number of years now and we're very pleased that we came across OCI in Seoul and They have a significant chemical facility to the southwest of Seoul where they produce hydrochloric acid amongst other things and they're extremely keen to Pursue the opportunity with us to join venture in a rare earth separation plant located in Korea So at the moment it's a non-binding arrangement We're working hard to sort of push forward with that to make it a lot more formal and binding and We hope to have have some news on that fairly soon Well, I'm sure the investor Intel audience is hearing what Outstanding operators that the air of your team is and what I enjoyed reading was that you've again reduced operating a capital cost by 7 and 16 percent respectfully You've downsized your and relocated your corporate offices by the way they look fantastic and Can you give us a little bit more about this? You also talked about a salary freeze since 2013 Yeah, I guess we're we're not alone there. We're very cost-conscious and we've had to do more with less We've reduced our corporate overhead in terms of headcount and or our office space has significantly reduced we have 13 million dollars in the bank and we're hanging on to that and trying to get the best bang for our buck and so you know, we've had to Look at ways that we can find efficiencies across the board We've also And you touched on the OPEX and the CAPEX which was a great result again from our from our internal team But some more importantly, I think this is time round the numbers have been Validated by an external engineering group in like a podium and we've also brought in some experts around dams and tailings which contributed significantly to that capital reduction and You know, it's a good it's a good result And I think it's just something that we need to do in this Capital-constrained environment and and we hope to squeeze out a bit more still so in addition to the questions I've asked you from your AGM. I mean it was a very thorough PowerPoint You've been doing a lot of traveling. Is there anything else you'd like to highlight for investor Intel? Investors because I know a lot of us have been watching you for the last couple of years and we're really cheering for you Gavin Well, thank you very much and we're cheering as well Look, it was a it was a good shareholders meeting. We had a Good number of shareholders and and they were you know, they've been long-term and and very loyal shareholders with us one of the things that has one of the the recent Things that we can certainly start considering now that we're getting our capital costs down to you know around a billion dollar mark is Whether you know a billion dollars is a lot for any company to raise And being a small a junior explorer is no different for us. What's even harder for us But it allows us now to consider maybe staging or a reduced throughput scenario for our production So what that means is if we can get the capital down to a realistic level Something that might be a little bit easier to fund We're now starting to investigate whether we can actually stage our production Or to produce to start off with a smaller size plant that That that is a lot more bankable in this current market So we'll certainly start looking at that over the over the next Three to six months. I think there's a lot of upside there I think the other thing that really came out about our shareholders meeting Which may or may not have come across in some of the audio or the all the public announcements Was that our major shareholder ECE? And their nominee director mr. Mr. Dean actually said a few words obviously Chinese But the translation and I'll give you the short version was that they remain extremely supportive of our furor They believe that we're on the right track. They've been helping us with our Chinese optimization program There's some upside people believe that they come out of that Some of the work up there has has been showing some good signs of maybe changing some reagents around that might actually provide some further operating capital and just operational benefits And you know, they're extremely supportive and and they're open for business in terms of They understand that they may get diluted over time and they're willing to do that provided that we have the right strategic partners alongside us and they're helping us to work through that process So I think that's extremely encouraging to have your major shareholder give you that support in such a public forum Well, thank you so much for the update Gavin as always. It's a pleasure to it's a pleasure to hear from you No problem. Good to speak to you. Thank you