How did Orocobre Ltd. decide Toyota Tsusho was the best partner for this project?
We’re focused on providing lithium carbonate to the large-format batteries and battery industry in general, and you have built in to the Toyota Tsusho relationship a very large end user of the lithium carbonate that we produce. We were also very fortunate to structure the deal so that both the equity, and more importantly, the debt component of the financing to build our $100 million facility would substantially come from the Japanese on very favorable terms. Most importantly it allows a small developing company like ours, a developer of lithium resources, to have an excellent understanding of the details of the end user requirements. Q: How much of an increase in global demand for lithium carbonate are you anticipating? A: Overall demand, for a while, has been growing at about 7 percent per year. The battery part of overall demand is only about 30 percent, but the battery segment is growing to 35 percent per year and is expected to take an ever larger percentage of total global demand
