Saint jean Carbon announcement is fishy and shocking at the same time (the CEO was rising money for drilling just a couple of months ago), they didnt provide any details, I knew the company very well for a very long time, and i dont want to comment much on it, suffice to say that I never trusted the company with my money.....their management change plans regularly, and that is not my style of investment......
However my best guess is that the company's strategy is to sell chinese spherical graphite mostly processed in china with only little value added in a some sort of a processing plant in north america, in other words the company could be just a façade for the chinese to penetrate the north american market (playing the middle man)....but with scarce info difficult to confirm.....
I must admit that dr zhongwei chen CV is out of this universe, what is for me even more puzzling than the contract with panasonic, is how the hell SJL managed to convince this guy working for them as CTO ???!!!!!!!!!!! unbelievable (maybe some chinese ties ? i have a suspicion SJL is buying most of the graphite from china and doing only some very little value added work in north america)
Dr. Zhongwei Chen, CTO, commented: “I have had the opportunity to work very closely with Saint Jean Carbon over the last year, specifically with their advanced spherical coated graphite for lithium-ion batteries and the very promising results have me hopeful that we, together with my global partners, will build the best and most advanced graphite electrode materials for the growing electric car and mass energy storage industries. We feel it is imperative to make sure that in every step we take towards future supply, we demonstrate our team strengths and constant superior technological advancements.”
Paul Ogilvie, CEO, commented: “On behalf of the Board of Directors, Shareholders and Stakeholders, I am honoured that Zhongwei has chosen our Company, over the hundreds of other possible suitors. We feel our working relationship over the last year has proven a very strong bond between our raw material and his engineering excellence. We are in a constant drive to move forward as fast as we can with the very best people, and with this appointment, we have just topped our own expectations.”
For those interested in digging deeper, they might also read this :
Minmet Carbons, a supplier of raw materials to the steel, foundry and mining sectors.
They entered into a distribution agreement with a Carbon products company named “Miluo” based in China.
The Minmet acquisition enabled Saint Jean to gain immediate revenues that would allow the company to develop and utilize the experience of an established industry leader.
The agreement with Miluo allowed for marketing, sales and distribution opportunities for synthetic graphite products in the NAFTA regions. “Miluo has been an established synthetic graphite producer since 2004 and manufactures products using proprietary and patented graphitizing processes from a 215,000 square metre (2.3 million sq. ft.) state-of-the-art facility.” http://venturerecon.com/2016/12/01/sjl/
