Rich-list backed Kali Metals listing a test of market sentiment towards lithium juniors
Can Kali Metals defy talk of a lithium doomsday when the company begins trading on Monday? A host of WA rich-listers seem to think it can.
Newly listed lithium play Kali Metals will be the stock to watch on Monday as the company and its rich-list investors look to defy the doldrums besetting the battery metals sector.
Kali raised $15m in an oversubscribed listing at 25c a share, with the company’s assets spun out of Toronto Stock Exchange-listed Karora Resources and Australian gold junior Kalamazoo Resources.
The IPO attracted interest from a host of rich-listers, with Mineral Resources boss Chris Ellison emerging as the biggest shareholder outside of Kalamazoo and Karora, through privately-owned investment company Wabelo.
Investment vehicles associated with Multiplex heir Tim Roberts, Navitas education company co-founder Rod Jones, as well as Mutual Trust – the family office for the Myer and Baillieu families – also sit in Kali’s top 20 shareholders.
The prospectus suggests its major asset is the location of its projects, with Kali joining the bourse with only drilling results across its Pilbara and Goldfields tenements.
Kali controls the rights to lithium found on Goldfields tenements owned by Karora – which in 2019 bought the Higginsville gold mine from Westgold Resources – and also operates the Beta Hunt gold mine in the region.
Those tenements have not been drilled for lithium in recent years, Kali says, but sit in the middle of a host of know lithium deposits – with MinRes’s Mt Marion mine to the north, its Bald Hill operation to the east, Essential Metals’ Pioneer Dome project to the west and Liontown’s Buldania deposit to the south.
The Pilbara projects are in prospective lithium ground with Kali’s DOM project about 60km northeast of Pilbara Minerals’ Pilgangoora mine.
Kali will be a key test of whether the downturn affecting later-stage lithium developers extends to junior explorers, which were among the hottest stocks of the year in 2023 as SQM and Albemarle put themselves in competition with Australian mining billionaires – including Gina Rinehart and Mr Ellison – to fortify their lithium holdings across WA.