The sale of Yttriumin China was most likely because of three things:
1. They have around 22% tax on profits for holdings there compared to 2.5% outside of China.
2. They see the current discount to NAV as absurd and therefore wants to buy back stock and needs cash for this.
That is my guess anyway and it should put upward pressure by adding maybe 100.000-130.000 shares on the buy side until the discount to NAV is considerably reduced. It was surprising to me that the stock didn´t hit 90 yesterday, maybe an updated NAV is necessary for that and higher. From the number of shares sold 70 cents yesterday (maybe half the NAV) one has to assume that alot of investors do not understand what they owned. I had my buy orders at 74 yesterday at the start of trading because I couldn´t really believe that we would open as low as 70 with such a price increase...
We are also rapidly getting a higher percentage of the company towards Terbium and Dysprosium which are the ones most people want exposure towards.
Dacha is the only way to really get exposure towards the squeeze now happening in the heavy Rare Earth sector. That makes them quite unique and I would be very surprised if not more and larger investors discover them as everyone can now clearly see that the stockprice is heavily correlated to the international price of these two metals.
It is very interesting to see if Lynas can overcome the the current problems in Malaysia. They do not add alot of Dysprosium and Terbium (but some Europium) but it would maybe be a wake up call for some that while some possible producers of larger quantities of Terbium and Dysprosium targets production from late 2013 they are highly likely to be delayed and the separation of Dysprosium and Terbium is the most difficult one as I understand it.
Asianmetal quotes higher prices of both metals (domestic prices only) this morning. Domestic Dysprosium prices are a bit higher then international ones while the opposite is the case for Terbium oxide.
One last thing. In the bloomberg article posted here yesterday, there were "promises" of sharply higher taxes on REE in China. That would translate directly into higher FOB prices and higher NAV for our holdings outside of China :-) who said higher taxes were a bad thing....