A Large Lithium mine under an existing Koalin mine operated for 140 years.
Hidden Value of a world-class Lithium deposit
Imerys is a decades-old French mining and industrial minerals company that today sits at the intersection of traditional industry and Europe’s strategic push into energy transition materials. While the market still largely views Imerys as a legacy industrial minerals business, a closer look reveals a collection of highly valuable assets that appear significantly underappreciated.
The company operates through several divisions. Performance Minerals supplies specialty mineral solutions into plastics, paints, coatings, ceramics, filtration, and life sciences. Refractory, Abrasives & Construction serves more traditional industrial sectors such as steel and cement, but is increasingly exposed to thermal energy storage applications — a potentially important growth area as renewable energy penetration increases and grid-scale storage demand accelerates.
Imerys also owns a graphite and carbon business that is strategically positioned for Europe’s battery supply chain. Recent European regulations around battery carbon footprint disclosure and imports could create meaningful advantages for localized production versus imported Chinese materials. In parallel, Imerys owns a 50% stake in The Quartz Corporation, a highly profitable high-purity quartz business serving semiconductor, solar, and other advanced industrial applications.
But the centerpiece of the story is the EMILI lithium project in France.
EMILI is located beneath Imerys’ existing kaolin mine, which the company has operated since 2005. Because the lithium deposit sits directly below an active industrial site, Imerys benefits from existing infrastructure, geological knowledge, permitting advantages, and established operational expertise. The project contains approximately 473 million tons of reserves at around 1% lithium concentration, making it comparable in scale to major global hard-rock lithium projects such as Pilbara Minerals’ Pilgangoora operation in Australia.
Importantly, the comparison may actually favor Imerys in several ways. The lithium-bearing granite at EMILI is softer and easier to process than the harder Australian pegmatite ore, potentially reducing crushing and processing costs. The project is also designed as an integrated closed-loop operation, with slurry transported through dedicated pipeline infrastructure directly to refining facilities in France. This contrasts with Australian spodumene operations that often rely on long-distance shipping to China for conversion and refining.
Despite these strategic advantages, the market currently appears to assign little to no standalone value to EMILI within Imerys’ overall valuation. Comparable lithium assets globally are valued in the billions of dollars even before considering downstream integration benefits. Meanwhile, Imerys still retains profitable industrial businesses, exposure to semiconductors through quartz, and emerging growth optionality through thermal storage and battery materials.
The current disconnect between asset value and market valuation helps explain why sophisticated investors such as Groupe Bruxelles Lambert have been accumulating shares. While the EMILI feasibility study is still ongoing, many of the key geological uncertainties are lower than typical greenfield mining projects due to the company’s decades of operational history at the site.
For reference purposes Groupe Bruxelles Lambert has been for decades the main shareholder of Umicore, the recycler and operator of Lithium Cathode active ingredients that we recommended last in May and June after management was spotted doing insider buying.
In our view, Imerys represents a rare combination of downside protection from established industrial businesses and potentially substantial upside from strategic European energy-transition assets that are not yet fully reflected in the share price.
For the Comparison of the valuation of the EMILI project in France versus Pilgangoora in Australia, here is the link
And we have also the page per page review of the Financials 👇
WATCH 📺 the link HERE
About the author
Geoffrey provides unique insights. As DM and EM start to switch places in fiscal dominance regimes, his experience from a firm that traded EM bonds in the early 2000s will prove crucial. He is also versed in pre-FX as reserve monetary systems ( prior to 1922) and it will prove handy to understand local ccy trading, and its impact in FX, bonds, PM and currencies.
Former portfolio manager of 15 years at York Asset Management, a US and UK based firm specialized in Global Risk Arbitrage & Special Situations, Geoffrey is now CEO of DocuTalk, a NY-based software company that pioneered a new visual format to interactively present documents in video format using patented technology (and featured in the ’30 year anniversary’ edition of the Investor Relations Magazine New York).
