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Sprott looks like it’s going long on lithium miners, and here’s who’s leapt ahead this year

It’s worth noting the extraordinary growth period that powered a number of lithium miners into the ranks of Australia’s biggest companies has, for now, cooled.

Pilbara Minerals is now looking like a regular dividend payer, while Allkem is seeking a tie-up with US-based Livent to trigger its next growth leg. Both are up around 25% YTD.

MinRes has stuttered as it shifted strategy multiple times on downstream processing and faces a big capex outlay on the development of a new 35Mtpa iron ore operation in the Pilbara, as well as time and cost blowouts on the expansion of its Mt Marion JV with China’s Ganfeng to 900,000tpa.

IGO (ASX:IGO) is down slightly YTD, largely due to a massive impairment on the value of the assets acquired in its $1.3 billion takeover of Western Areas last year.

But a number of emerging lithium names chasing big new discoveries are sitting on much bigger gains. Who are some of the sector’s big up and comers?

And number one is …

We bet you thought we were going to say Azure (ASX:AZS), seemingly everyone’s lithium stock du jour right now.

But actually it’s Wildcat Resources (ASX:WC8), which is sitting on a healthy … wait for it … 1750% gain this year so far.

That run from 2c to 36c – a market cap of around $240 million – has been driven by plenty of speculation, specifically that a potential lithium find by Fortescue (ASX:FMG) will be replicated or bettered across the border at Wildcat’s Tabba Tabba project in the Pilbara.

The excitement around Azure, which is up 1020% YTD to $2.47 and recently turned down a $2.31 per share offer worth around $1 billion from SQM, has awoken investors’ eyes to the fact there remain pegmatite discoveries to be made in the land of Pilgangoora and Wodgina.

Once explored by Pilbara before it made the legendary Pilgangoora discovery, Wildcat worked the phones to secure the old Tabba Tabba tantalum mine from Global Advanced Metals in May.

As for Azure – backed by both SQM and prospector extraordinaire Mark Creasy – it’s 60-40 owned Andover JV with the Creasy Group contains a tasty exploration target of 100-240Mt at 1-1.5% Li2O, setting it up for a monster maiden resource in the first quarter of 2024.

It would be remiss of us not to mention Raiden Resources (ASX:RDN), a $50m market capper that despite trading at just 2.5c is sitting on a 426% gain in 2023.

We’ll chalk that down to its Andover South project and its proximity to Azure’s landmark discovery, where Raiden has identified outcrop across a ~3.5-kilometre long, 600m wide pegmatite field, with some individual pegs up to 30m wide.

The next two on the list are both playing and working hard in Brazil, the next frontier for pegmatite hosted spodumene alongside Australia and Canada.

Dual ASX and TSX-V listed Solis Minerals (ASX:SLM) is the less advanced of the two, but is up over 360% YTD after intersecting coarse spodumene at its Jaguar lithum project in Brazil’s Bahia State, where a maiden 2500m drill program is under way.

There, Solis has an option to acquire a 100% stake.

Latin Resources (ASX:LRS) has a nearly 18% holding in Solis and is up 245% YTD, over 500% over the course of FY23.

The $900 million capped LRS increased the resource at its Colina prospect by 241% in June to 45.2Mt at 1.34% Li2O, including measured and indicated resources of 30.2Mt at 1.4% Li2O.

Bolstering its case that it could become a project developer is the successful construction and move to operations this year of TSX-V listed Sigma Lithium at the Grota Do Cirilo mine, expected to eventually be a more than 500,000tpa spodumene producer with scale comparisons to the WA giants.

Last and certainly least is Leo Lithium (ASX:LLL), which is up 135% but is sitting on almost 1 billion shares, which have been untradable for a month pending some unspecified correspondence from the Malian Government.

A little special mention is due, by the way, to Liontown Resources (ASX:LTR), which is up 122% YTD.

That’s largely down to the company’s decision to knock back a $2.50, $5b+ bid from US monster Albemarle ahead of the development of its $895 million Kathleen Valley mine in WA. It remains to be seen if a higher bid could fly in.

Source: Stockhead