The market is struggling with IRR. Let's face it, 40 licences, 5...

The market is struggling with IRR. Let's face it, 40 licences, 5 countries, multi-commodities, all at different stages, a whole raft of JVs, I agree its not an easy one to get your head around. Certainly not something you can choose to invest in with just a couple of hours research!

So let me summarise what the market has got wrong:

1. IronRidge is on AIM and its a pit of financing despair. Many companies can't afford to pay their board let alone finance their single licence, usually in a poor jurisdiction. But don't judge a man by his neighbours! IronRidge have never done a retail placing. Sumitomo, Assore and DGR have (so far) funded everything. No reason to think that this won't continue.

2. Sooooo many licences. How can they possibly cope? Isn't this too many for a small cap? In a nutshell, no. Interestingly, to get to this point (40 licences) they already ditched about the same number. Therefore this current group of licences is already the best of the best. And the company is good at setting priorities - it's clearly Ghana lithium (near term) followed by Chad gold (medium term). In parallel to work on both the aforementioned, IronRidge is also aggressively progressing the Cote D'Ivoire licences. I estimate that IronRidge has about 200 people working in Chad, Ghana and the Ivory Coast and are utilising SRK for some of the modelling.

3. Every man and his dog is looking for lithium these days, why is IronRidge so special? This is what Vincent Mascolo and Nick Mather constantly talk about - Scale! The current target at Ewoyaa is starting to look pretty good. Superb surface grades, a respectable pegmatite length, good widths and now world class drill intersections. But this is only one of about 15 mapped pegmatites within the Mankessim licence and one of about 60 pegmatites throughout the 645km2 total area in Ghana. That's the scale! So when every man and his dog are looking for a sale for their average lithium discovery, IronRidge should have a big advantage - why buy a 15 year mine when you can buy a 50 year mine. And with reduced capex - IRR's lithium licences are closer to port than any other lithium discoveries in Africa.