Latest news with #SyrahResources
AU Financial Review
26-05-2025
- Automotive
- AU Financial Review
Tesla extends deadline for Australian battery material deal
Elon Musk's Tesla has agreed to extend a key deadline for AustralianSuper-backed Syrah Resources, offering the ASX-listed graphite producer a reprieve to supply a key battery material to the US electric car maker. The agreement, which originally required Syrah to deliver all its test batches of battery-grade material from its Louisiana processing plant to Tesla by May 31, has been extended to February 9.
Business Insider
05-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Morgan Stanley Reaffirms Their Hold Rating on Syrah Resources (SYAAF)
Morgan Stanley analyst Rahul Anand maintained a Hold rating on Syrah Resources (SYAAF – Research Report) today and set a price target of A$0.22. The company's shares closed last Friday at $0.16. Protect Your Portfolio Against Market Uncertainty Discover companies with rock-solid fundamentals in TipRanks' Smart Value Newsletter. Receive undervalued stocks, resilient to market uncertainty, delivered straight to your inbox. Anand covers the Basic Materials sector, focusing on stocks such as Rio Tinto Limited, Iluka Resources Limited, and Evolution Mining . According to TipRanks, Anand has an average return of 5.3% and a 48.81% success rate on recommended stocks. Syrah Resources has an analyst consensus of Hold, with a price target consensus of $0.17, representing a 7.59% upside. In a report released on April 30, UBS also maintained a Hold rating on the stock with a A$0.30 price target.
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's Mineral Paradox
Resources have always determined power. The British empire's command over coal helped expand the realm to the ends of the earth. The United States entered World War II as a dominant oil power and for decades consolidated control over global supply. This century, power could be built on batteries, solar panels, and artificial intelligence. And China has a grip on the minerals—rare-earth elements, lithium, graphite—needed to make them. Both parties in Washington seem to agree that breaking Beijing's near monopoly over such materials would benefit the United States. 'Our national and economic security are now acutely threatened by our reliance upon hostile foreign powers' mineral production,' President Donald Trump wrote in an executive order in March designed to speed up permitting for mineral production. The administration has already green-lighted a new rare-earths mine in California next to the only active one in the United States, and today added 10 more mines to a list of projects whose permits the federal government is fast-tracking. It has also proposed flashy and controversial ideas to secure America's supply of minerals, including seizing dubiously accessible deposits in Ukraine and Greenland, clearing the way for creating the first mines on the deep-ocean floor, and investing federal money directly in U.S. mining companies. At the same time, Trump is breaking what experts say are the federal government's best tools for returning mining to the United States. Creating demand for minerals 'is best done by ensuring clean-tech manufacturing markets are here,' says Milo McBride, a fellow researching the geopolitics of mineral supply chains at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 'Yet we're cutting demand for the manufacturing of these technologies.' At some point, he told me, the administration will have to face the paradox of mineral security it's creating: The country is now smoothing the path for production while closing off its main destinations. Syrah Resources, a graphite supplier, is trapped in that paradox. The company's Vidalia project, in central Louisiana, is designed to refine graphite into battery-grade material, providing the first U.S. source of the soft, conductive mineral. (China controls 93 percent of the world's graphite-processing capacity.) Syrah is an Australian company, but it saw in the United States both a potential market for graphite and policies meant to encourage production. When the plant started producing graphite in February 2024, Syrah could bet on a few things to make its investment pan out. Under the Biden administration, the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office put up a $102 million loan to back the facility. The State Department, intent on competing with China to court mineral-rich African countries, had laid out a 10-year strategy for strengthening U.S. ties with Mozambique, from which Syrah obtains ore to refine. (The plan included improving transportation infrastructure, for instance, which would help get those rocks to port.) And the nation's landmark climate-infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act, was set up to redirect mineral supply chains away from China: Its electric-vehicle tax credit gave a major bonus for cars with batteries composed of American-made minerals. A year later, those federal policies are changing dramatically. The Trump administration is gutting the Loan Programs Office and could cut as much as 60 percent of its workforce. Goods from Mozambique now face 16 percent levies at American ports; tariffs are also raising the cost of equipment needed for mining and processing minerals, much of which are purchased from China, Kwasi Ampofo, the lead mining and minerals analyst at the energy consultancy BloombergNEF, pointed out. And Republicans in Congress are all but certain to repeal the IRA's electric-vehicle tax credits. Already this year, companies have scrapped plans for nearly $8 billion worth of clean-energy projects, most of which were factories for batteries and electric vehicles, according to a Canary Media analysis of data from the research group E2. In his attempt to fulfill his campaign pledge to 'terminate' what he called the 'Green New Scam,' Trump appears to be jeopardizing the domestic supply of minerals for the military and industries he supports. 'The administration is clearly worried about rare earths from a defense and aerospace perspective, and I've seen battery-industry players that are, in their rhetoric and advocacy in Washington, distancing themselves from EVs and selling themselves as strategic technology for grid resiliency and defense,' Seaver Wang, a researcher at the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank focused on policy around climate technology, told me. 'But we know EVs are like 80 percent of the demand.' (According to the International Energy Agency, electric-vehicles will account for 80 percent of global battery capacity in the future.) And the U.S. cannot gain an advantage in mining and minerals control if it has no one pushing to buy those resources at home. 'Without a clear, consistent demand signal, no mining company would put a single drill in the ground to make an investment,' Ampofo told me. He described it as a chicken-and-egg problem in which 'if you kill the chicken, you have no egg.' Even some of the administration's efforts to make permitting new mines and processing plants easier may already be backfiring. Ostensibly to help such companies, the White House ordered federal agencies to rescind regulations for implementing the National Environmental Policy Act; because the statute remains on the books and Congress has not moved to axe it, legal experts warned that the administration's proposal would mostly stir uncertainty, which will spur lawsuits and clash with decades of case law. Projects to mine and process minerals have long lead times and high up-front costs, including labor, permitting, and associated litigation. Those dynamics mean that for investors, 'you're going to have very low tolerance for risk and uncertainty,' Arnab Datta, an expert in critical mineral policy at the think tank Employ America, told me. 'This administration has added uncertainty and chaos into every part of the equation.' The White House did not return my request for comment. But its strategy seems based on the simple arithmetic that if you make mines easier to open and minerals harder to import, you get a domestic boom. And that's not entirely illogical: On an industry podcast right after the 2024 presidential election, Syrah's chief executive, Shaun Verner, said tariffs could help counteract losing the electric-vehicle tax credits, by raising the cost of imported materials and therefore giving the company's Louisiana plant a price advantage. But the administration's math misses some key variables. If a country wants an abundance of minerals to supply batteries to one kind of buyer, such as a military-drone manufacturer, it helps to guarantee demand from a more plentiful purchaser, such as automakers and the roughly 238 million Americans who drive cars. To rapidly divert mineral supply chains away from the rival nation that spent decades building up its industrial base, it helps to enlist allies who have not just resources you can potentially tap but developed reserves you can share. Trump's formula ignores the fact that blanket tariffs might make domestic minerals more competitive, but also hike the cost of the equipment needed to produce those metals. Meanwhile, China is following its own logic, in which it controls more variables. In March, the Financial Times reported that 'at least half of China's 34 provincial-level governments, including those of top resource-producing regions such as Xinjiang, have announced increased subsidies or expanded access for mineral exploration' over the past year. Even outside China, Beijing sets the prices for global contracts. When financiers determine the price for a ton of lithium, they turn to where those prices are set, which—thanks to China's dominance—is typically in Asia. That means the price of a deal between a Tesla factory in Texas and a lithium mine in Quebec is ultimately determined by how much of the metal China is selling in a place like Vietnam. The U.S. could find a way around that, Datta told me, by building an alliance with other producers and establishing an integrated market for contracts, with countries such as Australia, Brazil, and Canada, that could set prices for selling materials to battery makers in Europe, South Korea, and Japan. That's what the Biden administration aimed to do; the electric-vehicle tax credits treated allies that had free-trade agreements with the United States as domestic sources. For those countries, U.S. minerals were supposed to offer a less risky alternative to China. But now, Datta said, 'we've pissed everyone off, and all these countries are looking to hedge away from the U.S.' Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
02-05-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
Trump's Mineral Paradox
Resources have always determined power. The British empire's command over coal helped expand the realm to the ends of the earth. The United States entered World War II as a dominant oil power and for decades consolidated control over global supply. This century, power could be built on batteries, solar panels, and artificial intelligence. And China has a grip on the minerals—rare-earth elements, lithium, graphite—needed to make them. Both parties in Washington seem to agree that breaking Beijing's near monopoly over such materials would benefit the United States. 'Our national and economic security are now acutely threatened by our reliance upon hostile foreign powers' mineral production,' President Donald Trump wrote in an executive order in March designed to speed up permitting for mineral production. The administration has already green-lighted a new rare-earths mine in California next to the only active one in the United States, and today added 10 more mines to a list of projects whose permits the federal government is fast-tracking. It has also proposed flashy and controversial ideas to secure America's supply of minerals, including seizing dubiously accessible deposits in Ukraine and Greenland, clearing the way for creating the first mines on the deep-ocean floor, and investing federal money directly in U.S. mining companies. At the same time, Trump is breaking what experts say are the federal government's best tools for returning mining to the United States. Creating demand for minerals 'is best done by ensuring clean-tech manufacturing markets are here,' says Milo McBride, a fellow researching the geopolitics of mineral supply chains at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 'Yet we're cutting demand for the manufacturing of these technologies.' At some point, he told me, the administration will have to face the paradox of mineral security it's creating: The country is now smoothing the path for production while closing off its main destinations. Syrah Resources, a graphite supplier, is trapped in that paradox. The company's Vidalia project, in central Louisiana, is designed to refine graphite into battery-grade material, providing the first U.S. source of the soft, conductive mineral. (China controls 93 percent of the world's graphite-processing capacity.) Syrah is an Australian company, but it saw in the United States both a potential market for graphite and policies meant to encourage production. When the plant started producing graphite in February 2024, Syrah could bet on a few things to make its investment pan out. Under the Biden administration, the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office put up a $102 million loan to back the facility. The State Department, intent on competing with China to court mineral-rich African countries, had laid out a 10-year strategy for strengthening U.S. ties with Mozambique, from which Syrah obtains ore to refine. (The plan included improving transportation infrastructure, for instance, which would help get those rocks to port.) And the nation's landmark climate-infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act, was set up to redirect mineral supply chains away from China: Its electric-vehicle tax credit gave a major bonus for cars with batteries composed of American-made minerals. A year later, those federal policies are changing dramatically. The Trump administration is gutting the Loan Programs Office and could cut as much as 60 percent of its workforce. Goods from Mozambique now face 16 percent levies at American ports; tariffs are also raising the cost of equipment needed for mining and processing minerals, much of which are purchased from China, Kwasi Ampofo, the lead mining and minerals analyst at the energy consultancy BloombergNEF, pointed out. And Republicans in Congress are all but certain to repeal the IRA's electric-vehicle tax credits. Already this year, companies have scrapped plans for nearly $8 billion worth of clean-energy projects, most of which were factories for batteries and electric vehicles, according to a Canary Media analysis of data from the research group E2. In his attempt to fulfill his campaign pledge to ' terminate ' what he called the 'Green New Scam,' Trump appears to be jeopardizing the domestic supply of minerals for the military and industries he supports. 'The administration is clearly worried about rare earths from a defense and aerospace perspective, and I've seen battery-industry players that are, in their rhetoric and advocacy in Washington, distancing themselves from EVs and selling themselves as strategic technology for grid resiliency and defense,' Seaver Wang, a researcher at the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank focused on policy around climate technology, told me. 'But we know EVs are like 80 percent of the demand.' (According to the International Energy Agency, electric-vehicles will account for 80 percent of global battery capacity in the future.) And the U.S. cannot gain an advantage in mining and minerals control if it has no one pushing to buy those resources at home. 'Without a clear, consistent demand signal, no mining company would put a single drill in the ground to make an investment,' Ampofo told me. He described it as a chicken-and-egg problem in which 'if you kill the chicken, you have no egg.' Even some of the administration's efforts to make permitting new mines and processing plants easier may already be backfiring. Ostensibly to help such companies, the White House ordered federal agencies to rescind regulations for implementing the National Environmental Policy Act; because the statute remains on the books and Congress has not moved to axe it, legal experts warned that the administration's proposal would mostly stir uncertainty, which will spur lawsuits and clash with decades of case law. Projects to mine and process minerals have long lead times and high up-front costs, including labor, permitting, and associated litigation. Those dynamics mean that for investors, 'you're going to have very low tolerance for risk and uncertainty,' Arnab Datta, an expert in critical mineral policy at the think tank Employ America, told me. 'This administration has added uncertainty and chaos into every part of the equation.' The White House did not return my request for comment. But its strategy seems based on the simple arithmetic that if you make mines easier to open and minerals harder to import, you get a domestic boom. And that's not entirely illogical: On an industry podcast right after the 2024 presidential election, Syrah's chief executive, Shaun Verner, said tariffs could help counteract losing the electric-vehicle tax credits, by raising the cost of imported materials and therefore giving the company's Louisiana plant a price advantage. But the administration's math misses some key variables. If a country wants an abundance of minerals to supply batteries to one kind of buyer, such as a military-drone manufacturer, it helps to guarantee demand from a more plentiful purchaser, such as automakers and the roughly 238 million Americans who drive cars. To rapidly divert mineral supply chains away from the rival nation that spent decades building up its industrial base, it helps to enlist allies who have not just resources you can potentially tap but developed reserves you can share. Trump's formula ignores the fact that blanket tariffs might make domestic minerals more competitive, but also hike the cost of the equipment needed to produce those metals. Meanwhile, China is following its own logic, in which it controls more variables. In March, the Financial Times reported that 'at least half of China's 34 provincial-level governments, including those of top resource-producing regions such as Xinjiang, have announced increased subsidies or expanded access for mineral exploration' over the past year. Even outside China, Beijing sets the prices for global contracts. When financiers determine the price for a ton of lithium, they turn to where those prices are set, which—thanks to China's dominance—is typically in Asia. That means the price of a deal between a Tesla factory in Texas and a lithium mine in Quebec is ultimately determined by how much of the metal China is selling in a place like Vietnam. The U.S. could find a way around that, Datta told me, by building an alliance with other producers and establishing an integrated market for contracts, with countries such as Australia, Brazil, and Canada, that could set prices for selling materials to battery makers in Europe, South Korea, and Japan. That's what the Biden administration aimed to do; the electric-vehicle tax credits treated allies that had free-trade agreements with the United States as domestic sources. For those countries, U.S. minerals were supposed to offer a less risky alternative to China. But now, Datta said, 'we've pissed everyone off, and all these countries are looking to hedge away from the U.S.'
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Syrah Resources Limited (ASX:SYR) is a favorite amongst institutional investors who own 72%
Given the large stake in the stock by institutions, Syrah Resources' stock price might be vulnerable to their trading decisions 54% of the business is held by the top 5 shareholders Insiders have sold recently Trump has pledged to "unleash" American oil and gas and these 15 US stocks have developments that are poised to benefit. A look at the shareholders of Syrah Resources Limited (ASX:SYR) can tell us which group is most powerful. With 72% stake, institutions possess the maximum shares in the company. That is, the group stands to benefit the most if the stock rises (or lose the most if there is a downturn). Given the vast amount of money and research capacities at their disposal, institutional ownership tends to carry a lot of weight, especially with individual investors. As a result, a sizeable amount of institutional money invested in a firm is generally viewed as a positive attribute. In the chart below, we zoom in on the different ownership groups of Syrah Resources. See our latest analysis for Syrah Resources Institutional investors commonly compare their own returns to the returns of a commonly followed index. So they generally do consider buying larger companies that are included in the relevant benchmark index. We can see that Syrah Resources does have institutional investors; and they hold a good portion of the company's stock. This can indicate that the company has a certain degree of credibility in the investment community. However, it is best to be wary of relying on the supposed validation that comes with institutional investors. They too, get it wrong sometimes. When multiple institutions own a stock, there's always a risk that they are in a 'crowded trade'. When such a trade goes wrong, multiple parties may compete to sell stock fast. This risk is higher in a company without a history of growth. You can see Syrah Resources' historic earnings and revenue below, but keep in mind there's always more to the story. Institutional investors own over 50% of the company, so together than can probably strongly influence board decisions. Hedge funds don't have many shares in Syrah Resources. Australian Super Pty Ltd is currently the company's largest shareholder with 33% of shares outstanding. In comparison, the second and third largest shareholders hold about 7.0% and 5.0% of the stock. On looking further, we found that 54% of the shares are owned by the top 5 shareholders. In other words, these shareholders have a meaningful say in the decisions of the company. While studying institutional ownership for a company can add value to your research, it is also a good practice to research analyst recommendations to get a deeper understand of a stock's expected performance. There are a reasonable number of analysts covering the stock, so it might be useful to find out their aggregate view on the future. While the precise definition of an insider can be subjective, almost everyone considers board members to be insiders. Management ultimately answers to the board. However, it is not uncommon for managers to be executive board members, especially if they are a founder or the CEO. Most consider insider ownership a positive because it can indicate the board is well aligned with other shareholders. However, on some occasions too much power is concentrated within this group. We can report that insiders do own shares in Syrah Resources Limited. In their own names, insiders own AU$17m worth of stock in the AU$240m company. This shows at least some alignment, but we usually like to see larger insider holdings. You can click here to see if those insiders have been buying or selling. With a 18% ownership, the general public, mostly comprising of individual investors, have some degree of sway over Syrah Resources. While this group can't necessarily call the shots, it can certainly have a real influence on how the company is run. Our data indicates that Private Companies hold 3.6%, of the company's shares. It might be worth looking deeper into this. If related parties, such as insiders, have an interest in one of these private companies, that should be disclosed in the annual report. Private companies may also have a strategic interest in the company. While it is well worth considering the different groups that own a company, there are other factors that are even more important. Case in point: We've spotted 2 warning signs for Syrah Resources you should be aware of. Ultimately the future is most important. You can access this free report on analyst forecasts for the company. NB: Figures in this article are calculated using data from the last twelve months, which refer to the 12-month period ending on the last date of the month the financial statement is dated. This may not be consistent with full year annual report figures. Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team (at) article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned. Sign in to access your portfolio
