When I last posted on the sector in May I identified 51 companies in the lithium space with a combined market cap of $3.3 B. This month there are 60 companies with a combined market cap of $3.9B. That is, a 15% increase in the number of players over a month, and the combined market cap increased by 15%. This  is quite a good performance compared with May. The major reason seems to be that more drill results are being reported than in May, when the sector was starting to soften.

It should be noted that there will be other companies in the space that I am not aware of. Essentially, all companies on the list have made one or more “lithium” announcements this year.

Read more on lithium  here, here and here.

The table below shows the ASX lithium plays with YTD gains and current market cap. In May the average YTD gain was 159%, it is 207% this month.

LI_July

The chart below shows the companies listed in order of marketcap,  the orange Pareto line shows the cumulative percentage of total sector marketcap.  Of note is that ORE has drawn away from PLS and GXY and the tail has become even longer.

 

Li_July_Chart

The same story is being repeated on other exchanges, the world will soon be absolutely awash with lithium as existing resources are already huge.

18 July 2016 Commodities