Don Bubar on Avalon’s strategic approach to lithium production

May 30, 2018 – “I have been running Avalon as a publicly traded company in this specialty metals and minerals space for over 20 years now and have seen quite an evolution in the space from when I first started with our lithium project where these were basically little known, little appreciated and very poorly understood emerging commodities to where we are now where this is becoming quite an important subsector of the mineral industry, particularly with this whole evolution of the battery industry, energy storage technology, electric vehicles is creating this whole new demand that we never saw” starts Don Bubar, President, CEO and Director of Avalon Advanced Materials Inc. (TSX: AVL | OTCQX: AVLNF), in a recent presentation at the 7th Annual InvestorIntel Summit – Buds, Batteries & Blockchain 2018.

Don Bubar: Believe it or not I have been running Avalon as a publicly traded company in this specialty metals and minerals space for over 20 years now actually and have seen quite an evolution in the space from when I first started with our lithium project where these were basically little known, little appreciated and very poorly understood emerging commodities to where we are now where this is becoming quite an important subsector of the mineral industry, particularly with this whole evolution of the battery industry, energy storage technology, electric vehicles is creating this whole new demand that we never saw. We could perhaps see coming in the distant future 20 years ago, but it is definitely upon us now. It has changed the game in some very dramatic ways. I think it is time that this subsector of the mineral industry really look at how it wants to brand itself because it is such a different sector of the mineral industry. We refer to these as commodities, but they are really not commodities in the traditional sense of the term. They do not trade on commodity exchanges. They are really highly refined chemical products that you need to produce for specific applications in the marketplace. There is a lot of new terminology starting to emerge on this. InvestorIntel uses technology metals. I hear energy metals being used quite a bit now; advanced materials; cleantech materials, that is one I kind of like. I think we should all think about how we want to brand this industry to really differentiate it from the traditional mining industry, which is very, very different in terms of the risk factors and so that we do not confuse investors about what those risks in the business are. Let us face it most traditional mining investors just are commodity price speculators at the end of the day whereas in this industry it is more about the growth opportunities that these emerging commodities are presenting to investors. I say, now that I am hearing the blockchain developers and Bitcoin developers adopting the word mining, I say they can have it. They are the miners now. We are going to be cleantech producers, cleantech materials producers. There is your reminder on forward looking information. As I said, we have been around for 20 years now. I am a veteran of this technology metals space. As a result of that we have done many, many equity financings over the years. We have some 20,000 to 25,000 shareholders all over. Since the rare earth bubble burst there are few years ago we have seen a big turnover in our shareholder base, which has kind of depressed our valuation. On the other hand, we do have a very large audience out there that follows us around the world. Once we get some traction on one of these projects we are working on we should be able to really build on that solid base. Another thing that differentiates Avalon, in addition to the commodities we focus on over the years, is we embrace sustainability as core to our business…to access the complete presentation, click here

Disclaimer: Avalon Advanced Materials Inc. is an advertorial member of InvestorIntel Corp.