Rainbow Rare Earths Limited (RBW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the Rainbow Rare Earths Limited Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] The company may not be in a position to answer every question received in the meeting itself; however, the company will review questions listed today and publish the responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. And I'd now like to hand over to George Bennett, CEO. Good morning to you, sir.

Good morning to all the viewers and investors. I'd just like to take you through my Rainbow presentation. And as mentioned, there will be question time at the end of the presentation. So here's the normal disclaimer, and now we can move on. Thank you. The Chinese are, as we know, dominant in this market. And this was a strategy adopted many, many years ago. In fact, as early as 1992, as you can see from that quote, the Chinese said, "The Middle East has oil, we've got rare earth," and they set out a strategy to dominate this market, which they have done successfully and which is what's creating so much hype in the Western World today. At the moment, the supply/demand fundamentals for rare earth are very, very robust and very strong, mainly driven by 2 key areas of green technology in the world, that being wind turbine green power and electric vehicles. Electric vehicle demand and wind power demand are driving the demand for permanent magnets, and permanent magnets require 2 key rare earth elements being neodymium and praseodymium and to certain amount of dysprosium and terbium. At the moment, demand for these 2 sources of energy being green wind turbine power and electric vehicles are creating a deficit in neodymium and praseodymium, which as you can see in the chart below, is expected to grow to 2030 to be somewhere around 160,000 tonnes of global REO magnet demand. So as I said, the macro looks very good, and Rainbow is present to take advantage of this through a strong portfolio of assets that we're busy building. And we've currently got the Phalaborwa project in South Africa, which I'll talk about later, where we're going to be recovering separated rare earth oxides from phosphogypsum stacks that sit in the mining town in South Africa. We also have a hard rock mining project in Burundi, where we've been successfully trial mining in Burundi for a number of years now and producing one of the highest grade rare earth concentrates in the world, just using a simple gravity separation and shaking tables. And then we've also got -- we've just announced the development of our flow sheet for Palabora, which we'd be looking to patent, and this is opening up other opportunities for Rainbow, and we signed one of these opportunities last month with an MOU that's announced in the RNS at the beginning of June. Also key is that I think we've got one of the most experienced teams in -- for any junior miner in terms of being able to deliver these projects successfully to our shareholders. Myself and Dave Dodd, my technical director, we were both the key guys at MDM Engineering, which is a company I founded in 2006, and Dave has a long history in the previous Indian [indiscernible] where he was a partner. And together, Dave and I have developed over 22 mines, and built in and developed over 22 mines and processing plants around Africa and around the world. And we've done over 40 feasibility studies as MDM Engineering. And Dave, in his own careers, has designed and developed over 100 processed plants for mines around the continent and around the globe, and completed over 100 feasibility studies. So it's very key that we've got guys who have designed and built mines and processed plants successfully. And we also have a Chairman in the form of Adonis Pouroulis, who has a huge background in mining, being successful Chairman of one of the largest diamond -- pioneered one of the largest diamond mining companies in the world, as well as numerous other mining projects around the world. And Pete Gardner is a very experienced CFO with -- being on the Board of many listed mining companies in Africa. So I think we've got the right team that can deliver for our shareholders. Going forward, just to talk about Burundi quickly. Burundi, as I said, we've got 39 square kilometers. In Burundi mining license area, we've got 7 historical Belgium mines within our mining license area. We've got 57 targets. We've been trial mining there since 2017, and we've successfully produced well over 2,500 tonnes of rare earth concentrate, which we shipped to China successfully. This concentrate, as I mentioned, is grades, between 54% and 56% grade TREO. It's probably the second or third highest grade concentrates in the world today. And as I said, we've got 19.5% NdPr in our rare earth basket, and Burundi which makes up about 85% of the value of the basket. We've also got very low uranium and thorium content, and this asset, which makes it a very green and benign project in terms of our tailings. And we successfully shipped, as I say, to China for the last few years, where we consistently get below what they call the becquerel units in China, 10 becquerel units, we shipped about 6.7, 6.8 becquerel units successfully into China. So we don't have any of the uranium and thorium problems most of development projects have around the world. We have basically been able to take this operation from when I got involved pre-2020, it was a large-scale [indiscernible] mining using some equipment to remove the overburden to a more formalized mining operation, as you can see in the photograph below in terms of the latest operations, and we were basically cash flow positive with more conventional mining method, where we're successfully mining at about 12.5% to 13.5% grade TREO in this deposit. And where the Burundi government stopped operations to renegotiate the mining convention, which we are busy dealing with the Burundi government. And as I mentioned, it wasn't only the Rainbow operation that stopped in Burundi, they stopped all mining operations in Burundi, and none of these mining operations have been given the restart by the government to renegotiate at mining conventions with the mining companies. We were in Burundi, and in end of April, May, where we submitted the proposal, we're just waiting for the Burundi government to get back to us. But we are seeing some movements with our operation in Burundi, and I look forward to restarting operations hopefully quite soon. Basically, our flagship operation or project is the Phalaborwa tailings project in South Africa. Here, we are able to secure an asset which has got 40 million tonnes or plus -- 38 million to 40 million tonnes of gypsum residue, which is a result of hard rock mining or phosphate rock next door by Foskor. They produced a phosphate slurry, concentrated slurry, which was then pumped next door to Sasol to get a phosphoric acid production plant. This feedstock for the phosphoric acid production plant was then submitted to lots of heat and sulfuric acid, which is used in the process. And this basically lead to a residue being deposited at this phosphoric plant, acid plant to the tune of, as I said, plus minus 38 million tonnes. Now the grade of the rare earth in the phosphate hard rock in mine next door by Foskor in itself is not economically viable because it's very low grade. But because of the concentration process done by Foskor and then the phosphoric acid production process, we find in our revenue stacks that we've got a grade of TREO at only 0.43%. Now 0.43% when you compare this grade to ionic clay liquid deposits around the world and what they mine in China, it's roughly between 6x and 10x higher grade than ionic clay deposit. The reason why I compared to ionic clay deposits is because we don't have any mining costs associated with Phalaborwa, and ionic clay deposits, as the name suggests, this is clay, it's free-dig material where they solicit into a process plant where they extracted the rare earths. It is some recent process to what Rainbow will be doing at Phalaborwa. And when you compare to hard rock deposits, our grade compares even to some of the hard rock deposits being developed out there, we're very close to a grade of some hard rock deposits. But very importantly, our neodymium and praseodymium content is very, very high compared to any ionic clay deposit that we see around the world, and these are where your key rare earth elements -- these 2 key rare earth elements is where most of your value comes from, plus we have a very significant praseodymium and dysprosium and terbium. Those 4 key rare earth elements make up about 95% of the value of our basket. And this is what attracted me to securing this asset some 18-odd months ago, just over 18 months ago now. Sorry, just to go back, as I mentioned, the Phalaborwa project is a result of historic initial flotation of concentration by Foskor, followed by the processing at Sasol to create phosphoric acid. This plant was mothballed in 2014, and it does not operate at the moment. But Rainbow has got all the infrastructure available to it for when we construct our chemical processing facility at Bosveld Phosphates who are our partners in this. We have 70% of the project, and Bosveld Phosphates are a 30% partner in the project. There's no need for hard rock mining, crushing and milling, which is obviously very, very significant from a capital point of view, as well as OpEx point of view in any mining operation. And the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, the rare earth elements have already been cracked and sit in the chemical form in the stacks because of the sulfuric acid and the heat plant. In the phosphoric acid process, we have what's known as our rare earth sits in the cracked form. If we compare this on the left-hand side of that slide to typical rare earth projects, you can see all the fewer steps that Rainbow has in order to deliver mixed rare earth carbonates, and we've got now hard rock mining and hauling. We've got and we'll be -- what's known as hydraulically mining this, in other words, washing the gypsum residue into a channel, and we're looking at a mining cost or a washing cost of less than $1 a tonne. This hard rock mining and hauling, you're looking at anywhere between $15, $16 a tonne to $35 a tonne for a typical hard rock rare earth project. We've got no randomized stockpile. We've got no crushing and milling, which is very energy-intensive. We've got no multistage flotation using reagents. And we've got no uranium and thorium circuits to remove uranium and thorium out of our rare earth source. At Palabora, you will see we got very low levels of uranium and thorium. We don't have to do anything to extract uranium and thorium because they're totally below the benchmark set or required in terms of what the world looks for in terms of rock beating. We don't have to produce a concentrate, and we've got no cracking, which uses, as I mentioned, sulfuric acid and heat. We don't have to do any of those steps at Palabora. Basically, we start with rare earth leaching, and we've got uranium and thorium removal, as I mentioned. And we then go to produce a mix rare earth carbonate, which is where typical rare earth project stops. At Rainbow, we've also signed a deal with K-Tech Technologies in America, where we're going to go one step further, which is to produce separated rare earth oxides. The important factor about producing separated rare earth oxides is that we'll get close to 85-plus percent of the value of the separated rare earth oxides. The difference in the value from a published rare earth oxide price being the Chinese VAT that one has to take into account when selling separated rare earth oxides into the Chinese market. Ultimately, our market, we're hoping for will be in the West, and then we'll be able to get 100% of the separated rare earth oxides price. But as you look at rare earth projects that stop at a mixed rare earth carbonate or rare earth oxides, they typically only receive about 55% of the value. So we'll get 30% more by going in one step further, which is all the way through to high purity separated rare earth oxides, looking at about 99.6% to 99.9% purity. The way we do this is that we, as I mentioned before, we partnered with K-Tech Technologies in America and Florida. And these guys are -- have the patents and they are the developers of continuous ion exchange and continuous ion chromatography. Now just to look at the -- our flow sheet development, we made an announcement 2 weeks ago, which is that we've successfully produced a flow sheet that we know will successfully extract these rare earths in economic form out of Palabora. The reason why I stress this is that we always knew we could extract the rare earth out of the gypsum, but it was just to make sure we could get the right recoveries to make our flow sheet economic. And we have achieved this as I announced 2 weeks ago with an RNS on Rainbow. But just to give you the history, pre-1940s, rare earth separation wasn't much of a business in the world, and there was very little use for us. But during the Second World War and the Manhattan Project, it was realized that if you use ionic, sorry if you use batch ion exchange, you can separate uranium and thorium, which was used in the atomic bombs in 1945, and so they developed batch ion exchange to remove these two rare earth elements from the mineral that they were using as a source of these rare earth elements. Then in the 1950s, continuous solvent extraction was developed as a more economic way of separating rare earth elements from [indiscernible] or ionic liquid for that matter, ionic clay, I should say, for that matter. And so continuous solvent extraction became the de facto way of separating rare earth elements. But then in the 1980s, the original founders of K-Tech Technologies were the original inventors of continuous ion exchange and continuous ion chromatography. Now continuous ion exchange is used throughout the world by uranium processing plants, and at MDM, Dave and I designed in 2 uranium plants which are in operation today, and we did numerous uranium studies for various companies around the world. And these uranium studies all use continuous ion exchange as a way of separating uranium out of the ore body that we are processing. And as I said, the K-Tech guys, they took this one further where they developed continuous ion chromatography, which is used to identify and separate individual rare earth elements in very, very few processes. That's a secret. Compared to continuous solvent extraction, in continuous ion exchange and continuous ion chromatography, we can separate our 4 rare earth oxide that we chase in neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium in literally 9 to 12 steps compared to about 1,800 mixer and settler steps that we use with traditional solvent extraction. I've covered some of this in the previous slide. But as you can see here, we successfully developed a process flow sheet to allow rare earths to be recovered from these gypsum stacks. We know that our recovery is now sitting at between 65% and 70%, which is way above most rare earths overall recovery. Most of the rare earths projects don't achieve that kind of recovery, but because we start with this chemical form already, we've been able to achieve these very high recoveries. And as you can see from the photograph on the right there, there's a commercially produced continuous ion exchange, and we have also had commercially produced continuous ion chromatography units being built. These units are used successfully around the world in various industries, as I've mentioned, in the mining industry and biotech and chemical industries, the fuel industries, and very importantly, commercially up to capacities of 700 cubic meters per hour, and we are going to be requiring a far smaller units for the Palabora plants. So there's nothing new that we are going to be using and that another key point about the RNS announcement I made 2 weeks ago is that each individual part of the process that we've developed, they've been used successfully in different applications. They are all off-the-shelf reagents that have been -- that are available from a number of companies, including the reagent on the Ion Exchange. There are 3 companies that commercially produce the reagent that we'll be using on ion exchange columns, and there's nothing bespoke major and nothing that hasn't been manufactured before. So we're very excited. The way we can patent our technology is because we've been able to use them in a unique way in terms of we're putting in together with calculating the correct flows that we need to put through these various pieces of equipment, which enable us to get the recoveries that we've been able to achieve. There's a photograph of a continuous ion exchange pilot plant and continuous ion chromatography pilot plant has been built by K-Tech and delivered to a large phosphate producer around the world to successfully extract the 2 targeted elements that we're looking for, which is uranium and thorium, and this continuous pilot plant was a bulk pilot plant. So as I mentioned before, a large part of our process have been applied commercially. In fact, every single part of our process has been applied commercially in some form or another. But very importantly, it's been trialed on both scale of phosphogypsum produced around somewhere in the world, and that leads us to believe that our project has largely been derisked. We will be further derisking our flow sheet by building, well, doing a continuous lab-scale piloting at K-Tech in Florida, and we will be building a bulk piloting plant at Phalaborwa in South Africa to continuously bulk pilot our process flow sheet to further derisk the flow sheet before we go and build a large-scale commercial plant in South Africa. And this is very key, we're not going to make a mistake very well-known and large rare earth producer in the U.S.A., they went and spent $1.6 billion on the commercial scale separation plants without piloting it, and that led to the liquidation of that company; it has been restarted now, but they have changed that -- they're busy changing their process plants in the U.S.A. So we're well aware of the risk [ to be debonair ] of piloting something without doing it through bolt-scale piloting, and we will be doing it ourselves at Phalaborwa. So just to finish off, there is a photograph of these 2 gypsum stacks, and on the top right-hand corner, you can see the old phosphoric acid production plant, and all the infrastructure that is basically made available to Rainbow. And what I mean that we've got [indiscernible], we've got large high-voltage switch on at the foot of the one gypsum stack, we've got machine shops, workshops, laboratories, all made available to Rainbow. And this normally forms a large part of the CapEx of any project. So we do believe we will be a very, very low CapEx project for the size of production we're going to be generating compared to other development projects in the rare earth space out there in the world, as well as a very, very low OpEx we'll be able to generate for -- that will be coming out in our study. We've also got -- this project sits in the middle of the mining town, as I mentioned, called Phalaborwa, and this mining town has all sorts of skills available because a few operating mines are still producing in this area, and we get OEM suppliers in the mining town literally 5 minutes from our front. So it's -- we've also got exclusive rights to this flow sheet that we've developed with K-Tech that we will be patenting, and that will actually lead to the development of other opportunities, one which I've announced already last month, where we signed an MOU for another opportunity to use this technology that we've developed. And with that, I'd like to thank you, and hand over to some questions that we have received.

[Operator Instructions] I would also like to remind you that the recording of this presentation along with the copy of these slides and the published Q&A can be accessed by investor dashboard. George, we received a number of presubmitted questions from investors. And I wanted to start off the Q&A session with these. The first one is just follows. Why is the PFS/DFS taking so long? Are there any more delays probable?

Well, I'd like to repeat that question from a point of view that we only got our hands on this project 18 months ago. That was -- we started work on Phalaborwa in January 2021. We're now halfway through June, July 2022, and we've been able to successfully develop a very, very comprehensive chemical flow sheet, which was to successfully extract these rare earths from the phosphogypsum stacks. In terms of delay, we're talking -- we've been delayed by a few months, that's all. And one of the reasons for the delay was that we saw when we were doing our recirculating leach and solution and generating [ pertinent ] to each solution that our recoveries have been impacted. So we had to optimize this flow sheet, which we've done for the last few months, and we've been able to optimize this flow sheet very successfully and be able to get our overall recoveries, as I said earlier, above 65%, which is far higher than most rare earth projects around the world. If you go look at the overall recoveries that they published, we are sitting a lot higher than those. So even though it's been a delay of a few months, it's been a very, very meaningful -- well, it's been a very good delay in terms of being able to get a very strong economic results from our flow sheet. Also I'd like to point out that we secured this rare earth project. As I mentioned, we signed the agreement in December 2020 and January 2021, we started working on it. So in 18 months, we've gone a long way, we've really started part of our PEA and technical study, but we put it on hold while we were finalizing and optimizing our flow sheet to make sure we could reduce our asset consumption and get improved recoveries, which, as I've mentioned, we've successfully achieved. But if this was a hard rock rare earth project, 18 months down the line, you'd probably still be completing steam-sediment sampling, trenching, as I said, and initial soil sampling and being sort of aeromagnetic flow of over your property that you secured. So we are -- most Greenfields projects starting as I said as a greenfield project to get to [ where we are ], would take a number of years, and we've got there in 18 months.

Thank you, George. That's great. The next question is around funding, and asks, are we funded until the end of the year?

We are funded past the end of the year. I'd like to add, in fact well past end of the year, and we will fund it through to delivering a prefeasibility study as well. We are, as I said, we've kicked off -- well, we've restarted our PEA, which we put on a hold while we are just finalizing our flow sheet earlier this year. That has now started now that we finalized our flow sheet. And within the next week or 2, I will give the market a definitive time line of when we will finish our PEA, as well as when we'll finish the pre-feasibility study, and we funded through to pre-feasibility study as well.

Perfect. And just turning to the next question, which asks, how we're going to fund our South African gypsum stack projects?

Well, on the completion of our feasibility studies, we expect to be in the lowest cost quartile as a rare earth producer, if not one of the lowest cost producers of rare earth, separate rare earth oxides in the market. And for any mining project, if you're in the lowest cost quartile, you can only get funding. But with that, we are in open discussions with the U.K. and U.S. government because of the strategic nature of rare earths around the world at the moment. We will be talking to the EU as well, and they have all expressed interest in some kind of funding of rare earth projects. Well, we know that. We'll also have started discussions with a couple of OEMs who are looking for strategic suppliers of rare earths for permanent magnets that go into their vehicles, and we'll continue those discussions. And just normal funding banks. As I said, the DFC in America through TechMet or shareholder in Rainbow, and DFC has a long history of funding mining projects in Africa, and we've already started to having talks with the DFC in Washington some 18 months to 2 years ago. So we are looking at a number of options. And of course, we'll look to our equity shareholders, but we will certainly be looking to have a large portion of debt in the project with the balance through our strong equity shareholder base.

And how do you expect the rising energy prices to impact the business once the extraction process starts?

Well, it's actually a benefit to Rainbow, to be honest with you, because the rising energy prices is not a major factor for us in terms of our OpEx because we don't have any crushing, no milling and no flotation required to produce the concentrate. And because our chemical of phosphogypsum stacks are already in chemical form, in other words, they've had sulfuric acid and heat applied to them to crack them, we start 2/3 down a flow sheet. So our energy requirements to go to -- from that stage to produce separated rare earth oxides are very low in comparison to normal mining process plants. So we're basically a low consumer of energy. So even though the oil price rises, it won't have a major impact on us, and the rising energy prices obviously create more demand for wind power turbines, as well as electric vehicles because the prices of diesel and petrol, as you know, has gone through the roof. So anything that's creating more demand for electric vehicles, there's more green energy required, so that will mean more requirement for permanent magnets, which is a positive.

Could other metals be extracted from mine tailings using the K-Tech process, for example, precious metals, nickel or copper?

So the gypsum stacks at Phalaborwa don't have any other valuable minerals in them that we can extract. It's just the rare earths that we're already extracting. But we believe this technology could be used to explore possibly some other metals extraction out of tailings, and also definitely to look at using it to apply to phosphoric acid streams that are currently being produced around the world. And also some other waste streams. So as I mentioned earlier, we have signed an MOU with another opportunity with a large chemical producer in South Africa, where we know the rare earth is present in [ large ] phosphoric acid stream, and we have already received a sample from this chemical producer, and we're sending it for testing, and we'll be releasing those results quite soon of the rare earth value and net phosphoric acid stream. So yes, we do see other opportunities, and we are actively pursuing other opportunities around the world.

And just the final pre-submitted question here is, is Rainbow considering setting up new K-Tech licensing agreements involved in countries beyond the existing Southern Africa development community?

Yes, we are. We've already agreed to some other territories around the world, and we expect to reach to some further territories around the world.

So that actually concludes the pre-submitted questions. But as you can see, we've received questions throughout today's presentation. We thank to all the investors for submitting those. George, if I'd just ask you to read out the questions and give response to where it's appropriate to do so, and then I'll pick up from you at the end.

Sure. At the moment, I'm not seeing any questions coming from the audience. Come on, Sandra.

George, if you click on the right-hand side under Q&A.

Yes, there we go. The first question is, there are reports of significant rail transport problems in South Africa. Are these relevant to your operations? It's a good question, and the answer is no. [ The bit ] about rare earth separation is that we're not talking about massive quantities of product that we will be shipping here. So in terms of shipping product, at our current production rate, we expect to produce circa 2,000 tonnes of neodymium, praseodymium separated rare earth oxide per annum, plus about 65 tonnes of dysprosium and about 15 tonnes of -- 16 tonnes of terbium. So you're talking about 2,080 tonnes per annum divided by 12, that's 173 tonnes a month. Then it's easily handled by road transport, if rail is a problem in South Africa. So that's not -- we're not a bulk commodity. If we were a manganese producer or an iron ore producer, or coal producer, it will be significant. Next one is, are we independent of [indiscernible] electricity? At the moment, we're not planning on that. We've got a large power reticulation available to the project, it's already in place. High-voltage switch are already in place. And if we see, and as I said, power is not a major consumer in that process, because we don't do all those other processes mining process plants need like milling and crushing, et cetera. So if we see the need, we'll supplement this with some solar power. We're in a very, very high solar intensity region in South Africa, up near the top of South Africa. So the solar, the radiation will be very high if we decide to put a solar plant at Phalaborwa. No date for Phalaborwa production. Barriers to production are low according to your presentation. So what's the time line? Well, to answer to this question, as I mentioned, we'll be, within the next 2 weeks, we'll be publishing the time line for our initial PEA/scoping study. And in that time line, I'll give the market an update on when we expect to go into production. But I don't want to [ make a road to my back ], but I can tell you, we are regarded as a near time line production company, and that will become apparent once we make that announcement in a couple of weeks' time. And once again, no dates for Burundi resumption. As I mentioned, we were in negotiations with the Burundi government in April and May this year, where we submitted a proposal, so we're waiting to hear. And as soon as we get a confirmation from the government, we will answer, and we will inform the market about it. I might just add that Burundi in life of Rainbow is not significant. The Phalaborwa project will deliver about 8 to 10x the revenue that Burundi will ever be able to deliver on a commercial scale basis. So our focus is on Phalaborwa to get that into production as quickly as possible. Burundi, when it comes back into production will be, as I mentioned, trial mining phase to continue to develop Burundi to commercial stage, but it will be from internal resources generated by the trial mining in Burundi. So Burundi will be a cherry on the top. But Phalaborwa and our other opportunity we've announced are far more significant than Burundi will ever be. I'm just looking at the next question, sorry. I'm trying to scroll up on it. We've also been -- also we're anticipating major costs in the restart of Burundi. I can tell the market quite confidently that our stockpile in Burundi, which is some 420-odd tonnes of rare earth concentrate, is where circa $1.62 million at current prices, and that was more than enough to fund the restart of the operations in Burundi. This will not be a drain on any of our current bank balance sitting in London. As I can describe more on how this continuous ion exchange process works and I was able to work in a continuous process. I'm not a technical guy for this -- to answer this guy's question, but I can say is that continuous ion exchange, as I say, is used successfully in the uranium industries around the world. And what we have is we have a carousel, which is loaded with resin and which we feed solution that goes through the resin in this carousel. And according to a certain time settings on this carousel, this carousel [indiscernible] gets fed through by -- at a different place through a different solution. And at the right time, this resin -- this premium leach solution was then stripped off the resin and it goes down to continuous ion chromatography. But for -- I can put you in touch with my technical director, if you want to more sort of technical answer from myself. Has there been any progress on the Zimbabwe exploration? We looked at the Zimbabwe grind that we picked, and we looked at some initial reports, and we realized that the Zimbabwe exploration, we don't think it will yield any significant results. There's no real evidence of any economic grade of rare earth deposits in Zimbabwe. So we've actually relinquished those licenses. We've got a far better opportunity to fast track the Phalaborwa project, plus the other project we've now signed up in South Africa with a major chemical company. And we want to focus on those to be honest with you, and not Zimbabwe to be distracted from Zimbabwe, which we didn't believe would yield significant results. And another question, I hope to start to the West, what does that mean? I would like to think this was a given. To answer this guy's question. Right now, our Mountain Pass in America, the largest producer of rare earth concentrate in the world outside of China, sales to China, Lynas still sell some of their rare earth production to Chinese magnet manufacturers, and the rest goes to Japanese magnet manufacturers. And so the West can develop its supply chain to go all the way through to magnet production, be it in Europe, be it in North America, all producers of rare earth concentrate, rare earth carbonate and separate rare earth oxides like Rainbow, initially, we'll have to sell to China. We need the West to get behind this strategy of having independent supply chain outside of China, but that independent supply chain is many, many years away. And we hope to eventually be, as I say, a supplier to this independent supply chain outside of China. But what the market doesn't realize, it's still many years away. And in the short term, we will be in production before that supply chain is fully developed. So we might be lucky there might be somebody that we can sell some of our product to in the West, but the balance of the product will still have to go to China until this capacity is built up in the West. As I mentioned, even Mountain Pass right now is selling to China, and we'll continue to sell to China until that capacity develops in the America and elsewhere in the West.

George, I think you've actually managed to address all those questions from investors. And of course, company will review all questions later today, and we'll publish your responses on the InvestorMeet Company platform. But just before we direct investors to provide you with their feedback, which is particularly important to yourself and the company, George, could I just ask you for a few closing comments?

Just one last question here, is would you consider processing Gakara production through Phalaborwa? And we would definitely consider doing this because we will -- our rare earth concentrate we produce at Gakara is very, very high-grade concentrate, as I mentioned. And we will certainly look at shipping it down to South Africa and cracking it there in our plant. So it is something in consideration, and we will certainly look at it. And we have a good relationship TK, Thyssenkrupp, our offtake partner, and this would just be a matter of negotiation with them. Thank you.

George, thank you very much for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session as you'll now be automatically redirect to provide your feedback in order for the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few minutes to complete, and I'm sure it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf at...

Can I just close off, please, and just saying that with Rainbow, we have near-term production with our Phalaborwa project. We have already secured another opportunity for our process flow sheet that we're looking to patent with K-Tech and we have the high-grade Burundi project at Gakara which, as I mentioned, is a cherry on the top of Rainbow. So we have a project diversification, and we have country diversification, and we're still pursuing other opportunities to create even more diversification in Rainbow. And I think we're one of the only rare earth development projects in the world that has country diversification and project diversification. And as I mentioned, we'll be looking to create even more project and country diversification in the near term. So thank you for your time, and thank you for listening to me and the Rainbow story.

Thank you very much, George. And on behalf of the management team of Rainbow Rare Earth Limited, we'd to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you all.

Thank you very much.