Episode 206: Metals Hub (Dr. Frank Jackel)

It's Joe Lowry. Welcome to another episode of the Global Lithium Podcast. Today is episode 206. My guest is Meadows Hub co-founder and managing director Dr. Frank Jackal. Meadows Hub is a leader in digital supply chain software for raw materials with over 2,500 registered companies moving you will hear later in the podcast, 380 different products and billions of dollars in transactions. The type of service Meadows Hub provides is critical as the Lithium industry evolves. One of the biggest issues the industry has is lack of clarity on price. Meadows Hub is helping to change that and I have to give a company that I've criticized from time to time credit in this and that would be Abelmoral who was the first Lithium company on the Meadows Hub platform closely followed by SQM. So I shout out to Peter Hanna and the team at Abelmoral who was wise enough to pick Meadows Hub to enhance the effort to have more transparent pricing in the Lithium industry. At the present time Lithium is not a big part of Meadows Hub's business but they have great ambitions to see growth in the area and I want to do a shout out and thank Meadows Hub employee Chen Yu Zhao who was instrumental in making this podcast a reality and I will also say Wei Buqi, what a fighting Bhutai Hao which essentially means my pronunciation isn't very good. I'm sorry. In any case without further ado Dr. Frank Jekyll. Frank Jekyll, welcome to your first appearance on the Global Lithium podcast. Thanks a lot, Joe. I'm really pleased to be here and thank you for having me. This is an episode where I'm going to ask for two back stories. We haven't done an episode with a company that does what you do so let's first get the back story of Meadows Hub and then we'll move into your personal back story. Well Meadows Hub is a software company so we're a cloud-based platform provider and this platform is designed pretty much to digitize and optimize procurement and sales processes or raw materials and with a clear focus on the metals and mining industries so we're not really doing anything in the energy and the oil and gas industry energy. That's probably the wrong word here. We operate it as a software as a service company to our customers and we were founded end of 2016 in Düsseldorf, Germany and we started very much the company with a software called procuring metals, alloys and other steel-related raw materials and from there we very much grew into other industries for instance the battery materials industry as well. Nowadays we have roughly over 200, 2500 registered companies on Meadows Hub and they actively buy and sell over 370 different products on Meadows Hub. We're 50 people and over half of them are very much in software development and what we really provide is tender management software, contract management software, inventory management, tolling optimization, we've got elements of supplier relationship management software and customer relationship management software and what we effectively do is we enable communication of buyers and sellers through our platform and provide tools to streamline the trading, improve transparency and hands supply chain efficiency and companies use us pretty much because they want to have more efficiency, they use us for compliance reasons or for the network that we provide and our starting point in the lithium industry was only one and a half years ago. We'll get into that in more detail but let's get your personal backstory. I was born and raised in Germany and at that time when I finished high school I had to do still military service, did my military service in a NATO unit so I was constantly talking to the US forces in Germany as a translator actually. I had to translate between the Americans and the German officers so they took me to all the meetings. That was actually quite interesting. It wasn't supply chain so very much related to what I do now but after that I studied engineering at the RWTH, Archen University, one of the leading tech universities in Germany with a major in material science and when I graduated I thought like why don't I put something on top of that so I started in research and development, did a PhD in metal forming technologies but I realized at some point in time that research and development is probably not what fulfills me and I kind of finished my PhD but then I moved out and moved into strategy consulting so I was hired by Boston Consulting Group and because of my background in material science and metals etc I was on a lot of projects in the metals and mining industry. It was projects in South Africa in Korea, in Brazil which was fascinating and it was really a time where I learned so much about metals in mining that you don't learn at university and then one of my clients that was Anglo-American approached me and asked me whether I didn't want to swap sides and work for them rather than just consulting them so I started with Anglo in London so I moved the entire family to London that was in 2011 and I was there I started there as the project director for their centralization project of their commercial and my role was actually to bring everyone into two central hubs one was London the other one was Singapore and that took me about three years this entire project and once we formed this kind of commercial business unit I moved then into an operational role and I became the global head of sales for their Eloise business and that lasted until Anglo decided to sell a one of their really profitable and really good assets that was in 2016 there was one of their and I assets in Brazil a niobium asset and it was one of the cornerstones of my role so I thought like a "kay do I stay in Anglo?" I mean there was a role for me there or do I do something different and at that time I realised already how manual cumbersome trading and selling of raw materials was and as a consequence together with my co-founder Sebastian who was also at that point in time at Anglo in the nickel sales role we decided let's start something ourselves and that provides a specialized software actually to an industry that is otherwise underserved with when it comes to software. Well as you no doubt no now which you may not have known a few years ago is that one of the biggest issues facing the growth in the lithium industry is the opacity of price it's been a problem since I entered the industry before I entered the industry people have never liked the fact that unlike other metals they might be involved with it was very hard to know what the lithium price was is or will be we need tens of billions of dollars of investment in this industry to grow how is metals hub contributing to making price easier to understand and more accessible to stakeholders. I firstly joked this is not unique only to the lithium industry I think the key differentiator is the fast growth of the lithium industry if you look at it 20 years ago lithium was a specialty chemical low volume probably going into various applications and every single application probably had a different pricing and I think this is this is the key difference when you look at it that now lithium is the dominant use of lithium is of course in batteries and battery storage solution so what you see is that it has become almost a commodity People don't like to hear that, but it is. I mean, the more you use it, the more standards you have, it is being commoditized. And the pricing of commodities is, of course, completely different to the one of a specialty chemical. And how do you see that working in an industry that was used to, yeah, to spy lateral negotiations between two partners and depending on the application, you call it a price. Now, now there is huge amounts of being used. And I know it's still growing and comparison to maybe other markets that still small, but it is becoming a large market. And the pricing needs to become more and more transparent. People need indices. And I think there's been even five years ago or 10 years ago, there was not a reliable index. Might ask whether today's indices are reliable. It's not for me to judge that. But what we do, of course, is we help companies with our tender management software to run bidding events for price discovering. So a seller of the Spodgument can use metals up to advertise a certain parcel of Spodgument or the Thium Carbonate or the Thium Hydroxide invite bidders to make a quote to bid on this parcel. And with that, you have, of course, number one, a very competitive process around your product. And number two, you create a lot of market transparency firstly for yourself. And if you're willing to share that with the market, you can contribute to a better index and more accurate pricing actually in the industry. And I think that's the key point. A liquid Spod market is actually what we provide on our platform for those products. You have been in the lithium side of this business. You said 18 months, I think. You've already got the two most significant suppliers to the battery space as clients. And as such, you have a large percentage of interested buyers involved. How did you get Abelmore on SQM? How did they come to see you as somebody they wanted to do business with? Because you're not the first platform to do this. In fact, and you may or may not be aware of the back in the day when I can't remember the guy's name, he took over purchasing a Volkswagen and he was trying to drive everybody's prices down and then it became a thing and companies like Exxon started to buy lithium hydroxide and I refused to participate. And there weren't many lithium suppliers. And so I can honestly say that I probably effectively boycotted it. Boycotted it. Not only would I not participate, but I would make sure my competitor knew I was not participating, which would then leave them in a negative situation. And I think the statute of limitations has run out on me. Nevertheless, you are now a player. How's that road been? What was the level of participation in your first auction? What's the level of participation now? How do you see that unfolding? And what are the benefits to both sides? - Yep. So firstly, auction is only one mechanism that you can use on one metal saw. So we have different, we call them modes. You can choose from there's a negotiation mode as well, which gives you a lot more flexibility to negotiate actually with the counterparty. So and that is, this negotiation mode is very much like like a real face to face negotiation. Just that you are both looking at the same version of truth. And documenting it in one system. And you're right, look, what we do is not necessarily new. And you're absolutely right. I just, I can't remember the name of the guy at Volkswagen as well that introduced that very famous one, Spanish name, but I don't remember anyone who was. Like options, tenders, bidding events, purchasing events are actually the standard in many other industries. And why? Simply because it is number one, a very efficient process for price discovery. It's a very compliant process because you can actually ensure that you have all the quotes in one system that people are really getting a fair market price. And that's probably the key difference now in terms of why it works now for lithium and it did not work 20 years ago or 30 years ago because 30 years ago, if your product, the same product, exactly the same product in two different applications has two different price points. Why on earth would you go on a platform and actually quote there to have a different price point? You wouldn't be able to achieve that and it would create too much transparency actually for you as a seller. Nowadays when the product goes actually into a very similar application or the majority of the product goes into that very similar application, it is actually a very effective way of getting to a good and effective price point and achieving the fair market price. We're in this since the beginning. So we have done reverse options, options, bidding events, purchasing events, all kinds of events since the inception of MetalsUp. Just for different materials. And nowadays I think we have got roughly every year over five, six thousand of those events on MetalsUp with a several billion dollars of value going through it. So what works for other industries, why shouldn't it work for the lithium industry? The interesting thing is, and you said, how did it start? Maybe an interesting story. We looked at the battery matters or lithium industry already as MetalsUp in 2020. And then of course you had COVID. And so there was very little point in engaging with people if you can't meet them. But then I attended a conference, 2021, it was in Berlin for the Benchmark Minerals conference. I think during the COVID period. And I spoke to a couple of people in the lithium industry and asked them a couple of questions such as, how's your spot market working? What does your pricing look like? What are you basing your long-term contracts on? And the interesting feedback that I got there, it was even the CEO of one of those companies that now, through different purchases, ended up in Rio Tinto. Well, that's a small world. He said to me, I know we don't need a liquid spot market. We do everything on long-term contracts. And I said, but was your pricing arrangement then for your long-term contract? And he said to me, yeah, we have a very complicated system of exports, statistics, and everything. So you couldn't explain it to me in one sentence, how it worked. And I was like-- 'Cause you didn't understand it. Exactly. I didn't really understand it. I felt like, okay, this sounds odd for something that is becoming so important to the energy transition. And at that point in time, I said to everyone, are you becoming a commodity? But the overarching theme there was, no, we don't want to become a commodity. We don't think we are. And then I kind of, because I couldn't believe it, I came home speaking to my co-founder. I said, I think there's something odd there. And I don't think that they realize yet that the market is changing. And we hired a university student just to do a kind of a research exercise for six months, looking at what is the level of standardization of different products. Do you have standard specs, for instance, for lithium carbonate? And the interesting thing was already at that point in time, the Chinese told us everything. They were very transparent in terms of what kind of specifications they wanted to have, and so on. The Europeans and Americans, they didn't want to talk at all about what kind of specifications they are willing to sell. And I thought like it was clear at that point in time already the Chinese were the trendsetters in terms of driving the market forward. And you could see that also with the futures exchange, the first futures being actually traded in China there. But because we couldn't really convince anyone to work with us and doing prices recovery there, we said like, OK, well, maybe this is not the right time to enter for us. We did a lot of nickel already then in 2022, 2023. And then end of 2023, we were approached, actually, Bye. by Albumal, they said, look, we would love to do auctions and bidding events, actually, for a better price discovery. And this was the starting point where it was, I think it was literally a coincidence that some people in the organization knew about us. They were looking, of course, at the usual suspects for software. And they somehow, we got into this process. And I think for both sides, it was a win-win. For us, it was the first step into the battery matters in the lithium industry. And I think for them, it was great because they got a software tool that was proven already, that worked in other commodities. And we could actually also leverage our knowledge from so many thousands of events that we've done for similar, but different commodities already. And that was the starting point of lithium in 2024. The first bidding event started. And that, of course, created in the industry a very interesting dynamic. People were approaching us, talking about it, and so on. And I think then it was just the next step that someone else followed. And that was SQM. Take me through the mechanics of the early auctions, what volume, when is delivery, how did you vet? In what part-- what does the client have in terms of control over who plays and who doesn't play? So just the overall buyer cell or how does that happen? So everything starts with a product. So you need to define, as a-- let's say you're a celler of Spodiumin or lithium carbonate, you need to define what is it that you are going to sell. And you can choose whether you want to sell a very specific lot with the COA. And you can attach the COA and say, this is what I'm going to sell. Or you can say, this is my standard product. And then you can do a pro-rata adjustment, 6% for instance, for Spodiumin and something like that. So you define the product. That's the very first step. And we've got product templates. It's a very structured process on MetalsUp. It takes you less than a minute or two minutes. It's super efficient. The next step is then, of course, to define what are the terms. You start with pretty much the mode of the event. Should it be a negotiation? Should it be an auction? Should it be private? Should it be public? If it's private, who do you want to invite to this bidding event? And then you go through commercial conditions, such as delivery terms, incoterms, commercial terms, legal terms. We also provide some neutral terms and conditions, but you can choose also to use your own terms and conditions. And once you've kind of completed your wish list of terms, you can then say, OK, I want to publish this, either publish it to my group of companies that I invite to this event, or public to everyone who is registered on the platform and has an interest in lithium. And so we differentiate a viewing period where people can just view, but they can't do anything. And then you've got the bidding period, and you can choose whether that's six hours a day, three days. I always say, like, two-day period is actually fine, but some companies choose to be a bit faster. Ultimately, then once the bidding period starts, the invited companies or the companies that want to participate can either, depending always on the mode, they can submit a prize, but they can also, if it's for instance, the negotiation mode, they can change terms. They can say, hey, you are offering the materials, CIF, China. Could you do also CIF, Korea? And then from all those participants, the event owner, at the end of the event, gets an overview. I mean, they see already during the event who is submitting what, but they have a very nice overview of who is bidding on what, did any terms change, and so on. And then they can choose to either negotiate back, or they can award it to someone, which got all kind of legal processes behind it, whether it's a double confirmation and so on. But that would lead to too much detail now explaining the exact details of how that worked. Happy to give you a demo at some point in time, Joe. I think that-- OK, I will take one. I actually signed up this morning on your website. I saw that. In Chenyu said, well, you got to be a buyer or so. And I said, hey, I moved to-- I moved to percent of the market back in the day. It just is a one-man ban. But-- Yeah, you were ending up in all of that in process. So you were asking that, how do we vet actually the companies that are registered on Microsoft? So we have our own KYC process. And the very first step of the KYC process starts, of course, with is that a relevant company that should be registered on the platform. And for the listener, KYC, I'm assuming means no your customer. Correct. OK, so-- Yep, so it's all vetting process or your customer process. So that's the very first step. So is it a relevant company? I mean, if you can imagine-- because we're cloud-based and you just go on metalsminorshub.com, you can actually click on register here and then you start registering. We get a lot of garbage companies trying to register. So this is the first filter that we need to-- we filter out those companies that are just irrelevant. Second step is then, if the company is relevant, we go through a kind of-- they need to fill out a more detailed application form, registration form, with all details such as letter of incorporation needs to be uploaded, et cetera, because what we want to make sure is that we have genuine legitimate companies on the platform. And once we have all those details together, we do a identity check, we do a sanction check, fraud check, and so on. So we're connected to all these banking systems that we're-- where the banks check where their company is sanctioned. So what you don't want to have is, of course, a company from a jurisdiction ban could get us in trouble. Let's put it this way. Understood. And with that, we are then in a position to actually engage with them. Every company has at least one call with us, also to check the identity and making sure that there's a real person sitting on the other side, explaining how it works, and then we'll take it from there. You can also, as a paying customer on our side, you can also invite companies to MATLAB. And then they get a fast link to fill out all the things. Because when we, for instance, work with a company like Alvama, we also trust that to some extent, they do a proper vetting process. And then we don't need to check anymore, whether that's a relevant company or not. Yeah, they have too much risk not knowing their customer. So that seems carbon sense to me. And then you have-- usually-- I mean, it depends on the product. But then you usually have quite a large number of the buyers or suppliers for certain product that are participating in those events. Zalanda's offers technology and services that support both direct lithium extraction and conventional evaporation ponds. Minimize the environmental impact of your lithium site through Zalanda's data-driven insights and tailored solutions for each extraction method. Go to Zalanda's.com for more information that's zel-and-e-z.com. Let's go from early day-- and you're still in the early days of this with lithium. But how are you seeing it and evolving? What's your goal as to what percent of the market do you ultimately think could trade on your platform? That's a tough question. Well, what percentage of the-- you know the demand numbers. And what's a meaningful number to you? What makes this worth doing? And you had to have done that calculus. in even pursuing this. No pressure. Firstly, we think it's a growing market. From that perspective, and a market that requires maturity, I was listening to your 200 podcast with Dale, and he was even saying, the lithium market still needs to mature. And I think he's not alone in that thought. Yeah, exactly. I think we hear that from a number of players. But what does a mature market mean? I think a mature market means that there is a liquid spot market out there. That actually is setting prices for the long term contracts. And without a liquid spot market, you can't have actually a reliable long term contract pricing in place. Because it makes it too prone to manipulation to like if you only have a handful of deals, there might be parties involved in the pricing that can influence it in one or the other direction. So the more liquidity you actually have in a spot market, the better it is. And I think in the long run, if I'm looking like five years, 10 years ahead, I think the majority of the spot market will be traded on platforms, whether it's MetalSup or another platform. I mean, I hope it's us, of course. But I do think this will be the case. I know people always say, I have what this will never work. And we heard that in the beginning when we start MetalSup, people told us, yeah, it's so complicated. You cannot digitalize such a process. Of course, it works. I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work. You can digitalize anything you can map. Exactly. If you can write it down in a contract, then you can digitalize. You just need a bit of standards and so on. What is a, what is a, what is a liquid spot market in terms of overall volume? I think a really good number is always 70, 30, 70% probably or 60% in long term contracts. And the rest actually goes into the spot market. That might sound huge, but I think this is where the trend is going to be. And this is what you see in other industries as well. That a certain like 60% 70% number is locked up in long term contracts, making sure that you have your either security supply or that you know I can sell my volume of the of the mine. But I think it's crucial for every company to participate in the spot market, making sure that they have a good understanding of what are the, where is the price? What is what are the conditions because you learn from being active in the spot market, what the market thinks. And I think this was one of the key things where I was actually when we, when I had those discussions in 2021, where I was very surprised that people were trying to lock up 100% of their volume into long term contracts. I get it from a financing point of view that you know investors of new minds want to see that you're able to sell your volume and that's why they are asking for an off take. But does it need to be 100% because then you're actually blind afterwards. Well, you're dealing, you're personally dealing with both ends of the spectrum on that and lithium. From SQM's got one philosophy, Abel Marles got another so you're seeing both both sides of the spectrum. Of course, but I think when you, when you, your question was what do I, what do I think where the market is heading towards. I think it's heading towards a more mature, more liquid spot market. The alternative is not a good one for such an industry that requires so much investment that requires actually investors confidence as well. Oh, I can tell you from the last two cycles and now we're about to complete a third cycle in my mind in the next 18 months, but large capital that would talk to me about just trying to learn the basics of the industry. At the end of the discussion usually said this is, this is uninvestable for us because there's no, there's no way to know what the price is and there's no way to have, there's no certainty. So, you know, we got other options and we'll just put our money into some other industry and, and we've suffered as an industry because that, especially in the West. Because, and that's what I want to get into now is like you're, you're dealing in an industry that isn't the whole supply chain is dominated by, I mean, CATL's demand alone when you roll it back to lithium is bigger than the entire market was when you started looking at this. Last year CATL's lithium demand, you just can calculate it from how many gigawatt hours they produced it pretty closely was larger than the entire lithium market was in 2020 and perhaps 2021. So, you've got some disproportionately large buyers that have an incentive to manipulate the market. By, by various means and we don't, we don't need to get into that, but you're in a China-centric market based in, like, are you based in Berlin now or do so, Dwarf? No, this is okay. Why would you be successful versus the options that are inside China? I mean, how, how much does that decrease the size of the addressable market for you? So, a lot of the volumes, like in the lithium space, are being sold to China and it's not that we're creating a market just outside of China. So, Chinese companies are actively participating in those bidding events on Metalsupp. And that's for various reasons. I mean, first of all, the entire platform is entirely translated into Mandarin. So, with one mouse click, the Chinese buyers sees it, everything in Chinese. And that, the feedback that we get is, oh, it's super easy to use. They can use it on their mobile phone. And that helps, of course, with adoption. Now, when you look at, of course, the domestic Chinese market. So, as Chinese company selling to a Chinese buyer, that is very difficult for us to capture this. Because there is a certain level of influence, of course, where Chinese companies want to operate work. If it's between two Chinese companies, they want to work with a Chinese software provider. Yeah, understood. But when it comes to companies operating outside of China, there is also, to some extent, a hesitance to work with a Chinese software company. Because what we provide, actually, to the industry is independence. We're not owned by any mining company operator in this industry. So, we're fully independent. We've got a couple of owners in the venture capital space. They don't influence what we do. We're just good. And we're also, of course, being located in the European Union. We have to adhere to all the compliance rules, anti-clusion and rules. And so, I mean, I can tell you that I have all the time, we're monitoring what is coming from the competition authorities, what kind of regulation is out there. So, we need to make sure that this is fair and square to everyone. And I think this is something that, in data privacy as well. And this is, of course, something that Western companies are very much interested in. So, that's a level of trust that we can give them that no data leaks. We don't share any data with third parties, unless the owner of the data allows us to do that. And that's our sweet spot. And the market outside of China will naturally grow. Yes, it's dominated by China. But if you look at the politics around it, I think the world needs to step up there and make sure that they are. They is a market outside of China as well. But even now is a practical matter. Most of the lithium-carbonated equivalents at the raw material level aren't produced in China. China is dependent because of the Spodgamy. I mean, they they have the conversion. So on the chemical level, you have a lot of Chinese that would deal with Chinese. But when you're talking about the lithium values that make up those chemicals, because you're in Spodgamy and you're in chemicals, you still have the majority of the market that is a viable customer for you in my opinion. And the way I look at it, you, yeah. I totally agree. I think the market just outside of China is largely not. And what you see is, of course, even when it comes to the chemicals, like carbonate and hydroxide, there are refineries being built outside of China now. And in Brian, you don't need a refinery. I mean, yes, SQM may need an upgrade from time to time. But you know, the Brian guys are making chemicals from the jump. Yeah. But if you look at Europe, for instance, you've got the first refineries. They say, how competitive they are, don't ask me. I'm not, I'm not the technical guy that can actually judge whether, trust me, Europe, you know, I'll say this in my lifetime, in your lifetime, giving you younger than I am, you will not see 10% of lithium chemicals produced in cotton, head will hear. That's depressing to hear. But probably I think it, yeah, I mean, I just look at the last 10 years. And all the pronouncements and the relative lack of success. However, your point, I think, is that what you look at, what's happening in South America or Africa, you know, different jurisdictions, Australia's the hard rock kingpin, and it will be competition will come from places outside of China. Because that's one of the great things about the lithium industry is that China's resources aren't very good, whether it's hard rock or brine, which, which makes it more of an open market than say rare earths. Okay. So you have, you're, you're evolving as a platform. What does a bitter get just whether he won or lost? What information does a bitter get versus I am, I guess, because of your online platform and what the client pays for, they see everything. Of course, I mean, they see the off the bits that they get. So they need to know who's bidding. They know who exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Said, yes, we do have this anonymous mode, but it's, we don't recommend to use it for, like companies like Ultima, or the estimate, it doesn't really make sense for them. Because they want what you end up with, if you're awarded to a bitter, it's a legally binding contract that you end up with. Yeah, it's not just a term sheet. It's a legally binding contract with all elements to it, just digitally signed and not physically. The seller is duty bound to sell and the buyer is duty bound to buy. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So, but in terms of what does the bitter know in the end, whether they won or lost, of course, they will know, that's for sure, that they lost if they don't get awarded. But more. Anything else than that is up to the seller or the event owner to share. In some cases, companies share very transparently what the final price of the event was or at what price it was awarded. If they run instead of negotiation and auction mode, then you see also more information in terms of what your rank was, or what the price was. But the event owner can also choose not to inform the participants about the price level, the price that was realized or why somebody lost. It's not always the price can be also other terms, general terms and conditions, payment terms, etc. That are the reason why you didn't award it to that company. Is most of this open terms, or do you some sellers require LC or how does that work? Yeah, you can choose from a drop down list. So let's say you're a seller and you say, I want to sell on cash against documents via bank. And the buyer says, look, I'd like to use something else, which is LC. They can negotiate over that. They can change this if it's a, if it's a negotiable term as an event owner, I can also choose these are my red lines. I can say, no, this is a term I don't want to negotiate on. So for instance, inquiters, I'm only selling CIF China or X works a certain storage location because that's where the material is and doesn't really make sense to have now a negotiation that somebody comes back and says, I want to buy X works, Baltimore. Let me bring up a problem that that's very, very, very, very common in this industry and that is analysis where what a C of A says is not what the buyer analyzes it when they put it through their system. So do these contracts also have the dispute about we don't think it was 300 ppm sodium. We think it was 580 ppm sodium and then is there a third party or is that is that all in the documents that are negotiated and that's, that's aside from you. I mean, you know, I'm getting involved in that piece of the pie. Because that's after delivery. Yeah. No. So again, not unique to the lithium industry. This problem is almost like exists in all raw materials industries. Yeah. You promise something you you attach to even a C of A you deliver something and the buyer says like, I got something here, which is not what you actually put on the C of A. In the offline world, this is usually you find a dispute solution in the terms and conditions. Yeah, there are attached to the to the trade and the same actually on metalsum. Now, the question is what kind of terms and conditions are going to be used. And as I said, there are different options. So it can be negotiated terms and conditions between buyer and sellers of custom terms and conditions. It can be the standard terms and conditions of the seller can be the standard terms and conditions of the buyer or they can use our neutral terms and conditions. And in those neutral terms and conditions, we have a standard procedure outlined that in the case of the dispute, you go to a third party, umpire. Depending on what the difference is, you either meet in the middle or whatever, whatever the standard is in that industry. Let me ask you a similar question. In all of your dealings across products. And I think what'd you say there were 380 different products you sell or have you ever had a situation where a client actually says it's the product is this. And you've had too many situations or too many cases where the product didn't meet the spec and then you have to take disciplinary action and say, hey, you know, you need to get better at what you advertise because it reflects on you. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, even though we are never involved in the trade ourselves, we just provide the the software. We never take ownership and we don't want to take ownership. Yeah, I just do. And because otherwise we're not independent anymore. We had cases where companies were delivering products and a the spec on the COA and the real product that was some kind of difference. Now, sometimes it's it's like in the real world, it happens. Yeah, people make mistakes and maybe the wrong password was shipped, etc. So it's something that happens and usually between the parties they find the solution. But yes, we also had. So we have 2 kind of mechanisms that we can pull. Number 1 is we've got a rating system. So the buyer can rate the seller on the quality of the product. And if this happens frequently, this will be reflected in the company rating and the company rating is public. So you cannot hide your company rating. So a better gets to look and see what how this company's been rated in the past. Exactly. And vice versa. So the buyer sees also how the seller is rated. Yeah, it's like Uber. It's like Uber. It's like Amazon. A bit more sophisticated so you can rate on financial performance or payment performance. You can rate on communication. You can rate on quality and so on. So that's a kind of a mechanism in itself. And of course it creates some kind of incentive to. because if you continuously underperform, people will see it. And it has an impact. And I always say the opposite is also the case. People always talk about their tremendous quality of goods. And so how do you prove it? And they say, yeah, we have got a good reputation. How do you prove your reputation in the market? Well, with us, with a system, you can prove the reputation. If you have got 100% of top notch quality deliverables, that's great. And of course, we also have the mechanism that we can take companies off the platform. And so your continuously underperforming here come back when you've improved your processes. Did we have that? I think over the last eight years, since we've existed, we've taken two companies offline. Fair enough. This episode is also brought to you by MLC. Whether you need technical support for engineering, or setting up equipment for effective use of Lyme, MLC is your solutions partner. Visit Lyme4Lithium.com to learn more. That's L-I-M-E, the number four, L-I-T-H-I-U-M.com. Let me ask you about the competitive environment and the maturation of lithium. How long do you think it will take before lithium is not the oddity, not the opaque industry? And then how do you view the battery metal exchanges, whether it's A-Bax, L-M-E, what the CME, those kinds of transactions that are happening? The maturation process needs to happen quickly, but will it? Yeah, Joe, I think yes. I mean, we are already on this path. And I think it started actually with the PRAs already years ago, coming up, I mean, even fast markets, benchmark, S&P are providing now, price indices for all the major products. And they have done a tremendous job bringing the first level of transparency, actually, to this industry. Whether it's accurate or not, as I said, not for me to judge, and I'm not in the market enough to tell you people are OK, this is good or this is not good enough. But they have done a fantastic job actually providing that first level of transparency in relatively quickly. If you compare that to markets like iron or cooking coal or the steel raw materials, it has taken decades to get to that level. And the lithium industry has matured relatively quickly in a fast and a very quick period of time there. And therefore, I believe this will continue. We see the interest. And we see also that the CME, you've got more and more volumes. You've got the futures exchange in China where there's a significant amount of volume actually going through. Abax just started a lithium carbonate contract. The LME is active in this space. So there are various options. Now whether lithium will become an exchange traded product or not, or just a cash settle future like the model at the CME, I personally think it is more the letter because there's still some technical-- it's a technical product. And therefore, you can't just-- it's not entirely fungible. So still, there will be a level of who you're buying from and what the specification is and so on. So therefore, it doesn't really end itself to becoming fully exchange traded. But as a market of last resort, could be, how long will it take? I think we will see still in the next five years, a significant growth in trading volumes, both on the exchange side but also on our platform. Yeah, that's an excellent point. Is that cathode makers, battery makers, everybody wants to have a secret sauce and wants to create the illusion of a secret sauce. The battery industry could come together and easily commoditize this. If they came up with a spec that says, if you make this, any of us will buy it. I don't see that happening for a while. There's just too much hype and mystery. And somebody who spent almost 25 years selling to the battery industry, we probably-- when I worked at FMC, lithium had literally a different spec for every customer we had in some way. Until the battery guys changed that. To make it lithium a pure commodity, I agree it's being commoditized. But I think that hasn't fully happened, even at the Spodgaming level. Yeah, great. And that will take time. And if it ever comes to that, that's the question. I mean, even in iron ore, you don't have one iron ore. Great, simply because it's a naturally mind product. And the same is applying to Spodgaming. So there will be difference. But on the chemical side, I guess you see already standards. And when you look at even the standards in China, when they are publicly available now, what is a battery grade? What is a technical grade? What is a battery grade? Number one, two, three, four, et cetera. The original China national spec was Tanshi spec that Mr. Zhang got named the spec to try to disadvantage the brine guys. It had nothing to do with what the battery guys needed. So things are evolving, but watching the maturation has been fascinating because it really, not that long ago, was still very wild west. What did I miss? Why wait a minute? Before I go there, the dispersion in a typical lithium bed between high and low, how is that differ from other metals that you trade? Is it monero? Is it broader? I'm not asking for numbers, just an indicative comment. It really depends on the market situation. And that's what we see in many industries. If you have a huge amount of volatility in the market, then you see a larger spread. And that is probably true also for the lithium industry, when particularly in 2024, when markets were gone down, and then going up again, and you had levels off on the spudgy inside, 800, then 1,200 again. I mean, that's 50% plus within a few weeks. You can imagine that during those times, you have the spread is a lot higher than in times where actually the market is trailing at a certain level. It doesn't really move much. Now, the lithium industry is as such a very volatile. And therefore, in comparison to other markets, you see that the spread is larger than in markets, for instance, like nickel is relatively transparent. When you have a nickel event and a negotiate, and the price premium over the LME, you see them all being relatively close together. I mean, then you have the discussion of whether there's an eG premium or not, but that's not going to that. Well, I think that's a pipe dream for now. But that's just my personal opinion. You did say something previously that I like to push back on a little bit. You talk about the PRAs. And based on the information you're getting, you must have a pretty good thought of how good the PRAs are, because you have real data. And I'm just going to let that one sit there. And we'll talk about that on the next time you're on. But I think it's fair to say that the more transactions you have, the more you know about the quality of the numbers that you see in the daily emails. And I guess my ongoing skepticism about China's ability to control the narrative plays into that. So what did I miss? What do you want to mention that I didn't ask you about? I think-- I mean, we're in the software world. I think what is exciting for us is to see how is software going to be adopted in not only the battery matters in the industry, but in the overall raw materials industry. And I think this is-- you know, if you ask me, what do you think is going to happen to MetaSup in the next 10 years? I tell you probably, look, I think we're growing. The question is, will there be at some point in time a consolidation also on the software side? And I think that's, you know, I look at it from an entrepreneur perspective and that's equally exciting to us to understand how many new players are coming up there. Are there any new players? What's the role of AI? I mean, they're experimenting with that. I was going to close with that. So yeah, I'd love to know how you see AI is impacting what you're doing. Yeah, look, I mean, the role of AI is, is, is unclear, but what, where can AI help? Number one, it can make your life a lot more efficient already today. And we're, we're building, for instance, AI that people can quote not only through the platform, but already kind of just send an email and the AI reads it into the platform. Yeah, it makes it so easy. So you don't need to actually have the platform anymore. The platform is just just a system of record and you can communicate any kind of way and it still ends up somehow the data being processed there. So that's, how do you get lots of data into something? That's where I can be tremendously helpful. And then the other way, AI is of course also very good at analyzing huge amount of data where our human brain doesn't really see any connection. Yeah, and I think this is something, this is the biggest benefit of digitalization that I see and by using a platform, it's not only efficiency, it's not only compliance, it's transparency. It's actually, you all of sudden have structured data and you have vast amounts of data and making those data available to the user, they're even their own data. And being able to, for them to analyze them is such a commercial benefit for them that they, at this point in time, cannot even imagine. Okay, a brave new world. Absolutely. All right, I have just a few rapid fire questions for you. Oh my goodness. Favorite musical artist. That's a, in, that's a, remember, this is rapid fire. Yeah, it should be faster. It's actually Queen. Okay, fair enough. Yeah. Favorite historical figure. Favorite historic, Bismarck. I find him fascinating. Favorite athlete. That you won't know him. That's a football player. If I can draw from Shia K004. Okay. Had zero talent in football or soccer. But through sheer willpower and effort, managed to play actually at the highest level. Best advice you've ever given or received. From my wife, before I, I discussed with her whether to start MetaSup or not. And she said to me, if you don't do it, you will always ask yourself the question, could have had work or not. So just do it. That was well done by your bride. And finally, if you couldn't live in Germany, where would you live? Switzerland Austria because it's mountains. Or to be honest, I like anywhere where you've got mountains and snow. I love mountains and snow. I'm a passionate skier. Okay. Well, I spent most of the winter in my hometown. We got 15 feet of snow this year. So I should come over in the winter. Anyway, right. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot, Joe. Thanks for having me.