Walkabout Resources chief executive officer Andrew Cunningham said Walkabout’s journey was best described as “delivering on promises” pointing to global statistics that suggest just 81 out of 16,000 resources projects contemplated are ever developed.
“This shows you what a high risk game this is, the exploration industry especially, and what it takes to get a mine developed,” Mr Cunningham said.
“The ‘delivering on promises’ topic came from something that was said a couple of years ago to me and a colleague – we were in Melbourne, cap-in-hand begging for money to get the project to the next stage and a broker said ‘guys I must give it to you, you always do what you said you were going to do’.
“This is something the company has always tried to stick to. The money needs to be spent in the ground and you need to spend it on what you told your shareholders you were going to spend it on.”
Walkabout has had an unusual but admirable journey from junior explorer, project developer and now producer of graphite from its Lindi Jumbo project in Tanzania, underpinned by what the company has always believed to be one of the highest grade, jumbo flake size graphite resources in the world.
“It has always been about the quality of the resource and the ex-China supply of graphite into the western world – Lindi Jumbo has the highest reserve grade of any now developed [graphite] project on the African continent,” he said.
“It’s the quality of the product that we produce and sell into the international market, and it is what we believe is the right scale [of project] for where we are in Africa and for the commodity that we are in.”
The demand for graphite globally was expected to continue to increase over the next decade, which if the market were to play out as predicted, would require more than 90 more producing projects of the scale of Lindi Jumbo around the world.
Walkabout is predominantly producing large (jumbo) flake graphite which sells into global markets at a premium price, due to large flake size being preferred for energy storage applications.
In terms of the Lindi Jumbo project timeline and delivery, Mr Cunningham said the way the company had done things was “seldomly conventional”.
“It has been very difficult and sometimes pretty ugly. But, we have stuck to our guns and our strategy has never changed.
“We went through the ups and downs of the industry, including around COVID, but Tanzania just carried on through the COVID pandemic.
“During that period we started shipping some of our equipment to Tanzania and we were busy with our early works on the ground in Tanzania.
“This year we started our commissioning, in May we bagged our first product and in July we exported our first product, which went to Europe.”
