if you didn't notice it already, it is worth having a quick...

if you didn't notice it already, it is worth having a quick glance at the Fluence announcement on Wednesday, in which this company announced that they had signed a 165 million Euro commercial agreement with the government of Ivory Coast for the building of a water treatment plant. 

Outside of Australia, Phoslock so far has only focused on a few key regions since it first listed on the ASX: namely, China, Europe and North America. Apart from these, Brazil is the only other country of note in which the company seems to have made significant inroads. 

The fascinating thing about the Fluence announcement earlier this week is that it suggests that even the Sub-Saharan African region- the poorest region in the world- still has the potential to be a rewarding market for water treatment companies. There still remain many markets around the world which this company has not yet tapped into, with Africa and South Asia being the most notable of these, and if Phoslock was to expand to these regions it would appear that they could offer significant growth potential in the years ahead. 

Getting back to the topic of this thread, I was speculating in an earlier post that there could be good reason to suspect that the company might have a niche yet significant role to play in the River Yangtze restoration plan that was announced by the Chinese government earlier in the year, the aim being to clean up the said River by the end of 2020.

An article earlier today in an  English language Chinese news site, the Global Times, included some hard numbers on the funding that has been allocated to the planned restoration of the Yangtze River Economic Belt:

...China Development Bank (CDB), the world's largest development finance institution, has extended trillions of yuan of loans to support the development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt. As of December 2018, outstanding loans to 11 provincial-level regions along the belt amounted to 3.85 trillion yuan (about 575 billion U.S. dollars), according to the CDB. New yuan loans to these regions reached 304.5 billion yuan last year, accounting for 48 percent of the bank's total new yuan loans. The funds mainly went to major projects in the fields of ecological protection and restoration, infrastructure connectivity, and industrial transformation and upgrading. The CDB will continue to support ecological protection and green development of the Yangtze River in 2019, said CDB Chairman Zhao Huan. China issued a development plan for the Yangtze River Economic Belt in September 2016 and a guideline for green development of the belt in 2017. The Yangtze River Economic Belt consists of nine provinces and two municipalities that cover roughly one-fifth of China's land. It has a population of 600 million and generates more than 40 percent of the country's GDP. (Xinhua/Sun Zhongzhe)

The key points here are that at the end of last year, trillions of yuan, the equivalent of $575 billion dollars US (about $800 billion in Australian dollars) was provided for the development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, and the funds went to projects which included 'ecological protection and restoration', fields in which this company specialise.  

Assuming that Phoslock is involved in the plan to clean up the Yangtze- and there is some reason to suspect that this might be so- it does make you wonder how much of that money could potentially end up trickling down to this company. 

Looking further afield, we are now only days away from Spring-time in the northern hemisphere, and as the temperature warms hopefully we might start hearing some positive news from the key regions outside of China, such as the US, Canada and Europe. 

In the 'Business Update' announcement at the end of January, there was a mention of a 'pilot project in Florida', which was commencing in March. Possibly, we might be hearing more about this in the weeks ahead.