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IperionX (ASX:IPX) has landed a receipt of nearly A$7 million in funding from the U.S. Department of War, the final tranche of a larger US$50M package – and a delivery of some 290tn of scrap titanium metal from the U.S. government.
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That delivery of scrap gives IperionX, dual-listed on the NASDAQ, the feedstock it needs to operate its Titanium Manufacturing Campus (TMC) in Virginia, which represents roughly 1.5Y worth of material throughput. In between the lines, titanium’s hardness, similar to tungsten, makes it a key defence metal.
The ex-China critical mineral supply chain thematic has been moving from narrative in the last 24 months to structural reality, and this is another example of that process. For anyone who needs convincing, tensile metals are currently a hot market play. Just look at Almonty Industries (ASX:AII), for one.
The TMC will be scaled-up using the US$50M funding pool from Washington; notably, IperionX considers the delivery of some 300tn of scrap as being without cost. What type of scrap exactly the material is sourced from wasn’t disclosed.
The company desires to put out at least 1,400 tonnes of titanium per year as part of the U.S. defence apparatus’s goals to secure a domestic supply chain of the metal.
While that’s positive news insofar as IperionX’s ability to keep processing titanium scrap goes, short pressure on IPX has been climbing in recent history; currently, nearly 8% of shares are shorted, per the public data.
This has been the case since September last year, when HotCopper users were kept busy wondering what the funding injection from the U.S. gov’t would mean for that coverage. So far, it doesn’t look like the surety of funding from the Dept. of War, if one must insist on calling it that, has done much to keep short sellers at bay.
IPX last traded at $7.30/sh.
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