BYD Motors and Lithium Batteries - UXG, MAI, TNR

Hedge Fund Managers are impressed with BYD and its progress on lithium batteries - if Warren Buffet can be convinced of lithium-cars and batteries - can you?

Lithium-Ion Batteries for Hybrid Vehicles?

BYD seems to be doinf well with ferrous oxide. I’m referring to the Chinese electric car company “Build Your Dreams” (BYD) (see www.byd.com/company.php). CEO Wang Chuan-Fu, who Charlie Munger describes as a combination ofGeneral Electric’s (GE) legendary manager, Jack Welch, and inventorThomas Edison, scraped up $300,000 from relatives to start a knock off cell phone battery company in Shenzen in 1995. He grew the company into a massive, vertically integrated conglomerate, employing 130,000workaholics at 11 factories, including those in Hungary, Romania, andIndia (interesting choices). BYD bought a defunct car company in 2003 and re-engineered it to launch the $22,000 F3DM sedan last year, an old technology ferrous oxide based plug-in hybrid that gets 62 miles on a charge. General Motors (GMX) Volt and Toyota’s (TM) plug in Prius,which won’t come out until next year, will only get 40 miles per chargeand cost more. All-electric models are coming out this year. Warren Buffet was so impressed, he made a rare foreign investment last year,asking for a 25% stake and settling for 10% for $230 million. Wang, who has already earned himself a place on the Forbes 400 list, intends to build BYD into the world’s largest automaker, and quickly. Why do Ifeel like this war is over before the first shots were even fired?

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Rumor milll has it recently that Minera Andes (MAI:TSX), one of our longtime favorite stockpicks here at Mining101, could be a takeover target for another one of Rob McEwan's companies, the well-capitalized US Gold (UXG:TSX)

US Gold has primarily been focusing on gold in Nevada so it's a bit of a stretch to assume it wi considering taking over Los Azules (copper) and the non-operating interest of San Jose (gold/silver).

US Gold has the ideal gold explorer model down pat - value is created in the discovery and exploratino phase for shareholders. By the time mineral reserves are proved the value has been created from pennies to dollars - investors who risk getting in early has already won the rewards.

This is a very similar path for Canada Zinc Corp (CZX:TSX) who has had a difficult journey so far proving a significant resource on a commodity that fell out of favor at the height of the financial storm of 2008.

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TNR Gold Corp (TNR:TSX) is in the middle of closing its Private Placement - and understandbly seenig some selling pressure. Why this is usually the case is participants in the PP would sell their current shares (presumably around the PP level price) and in return get a share + warrant.

A warrant has a certain price level and is an excelllent low-risk way to have additional exposure to profits in case the stock runs later on news of results.

The company confirms portions of the proceed will be used to develop a 43-101 resource on a key asset from which International Lithium will go public on. Our guess is the large Mariana lithium brine lake, which spans 120 squared kilometres of liquid. Can you imagine what the resource estimate will be?!?

Production is simple

Example of a large lithium lake