Hi everyone, consider yourselves lucky (or wise) when I tell my story. My two biggest positions are NOT and ZEN. Both were expected to release positive news before the new year, NOT regarding EA, permits and FS, ZEN regarding the PEA. For some time now, it has become increasingly clear that the catalysts for NOT would be subject to delays, but there was no indication that ZEN would be hit by delays. As the remaining time in 4th quater was running out, I decided over the weekend to gamble on ZEN meeting the self imposed deadline for the PEA, and consequently I sold a part of my NOT shares monday and bought ZEN. When I went online tuesday to check if the PEA was out, I couldn't believe my eyes - and my bad timing. Boy, would I have liked to have waited one more day. And boy, was I envious about all the posters that were picking up cheap shares (I've been fully invested for a few months now).

Now that you're feeling really sorry for me (or smiling to yourselves due to the fact that there's allways someone who is in worse shape than you), allow me to tell what I think.

First of all, after spending 5 seconds reading the news release, I concluded, thank God - it's just a dealy. They happen all the time, right! So what, I probably don't need cash before I retire in 10 years.

Next thing to ask is whether there is a good explanation for the delay, and there is a very good reason in my opinion. We have to acknowledge that AE is depending on a 3rd party, SGS, to deliver. Everybody was probably sure that the tweaking would be complete within a month at the time of the AGM, hence the statement from AE that he would be run out of town if the PEA was not complete before year's end.

But with the purification process constantly evolving (in af positive way), it has just probably just been a case of the engineers getting back to AE with new idears to further improve the process on a regular basis, and suddenly AE was caught on the wrong foot, having approved further and further important improvements, and suddenly time was running out. Please note that I'm not sure the deadline is as important to AE as it is to us as investors.

But what does a responsible CEO do when he has to acknowledge, that he probably won't make the deadline. He tries to find a suitable time to release news about the delay. It must not be to soon, as it would seem that he's not even trying to make it (the bashers would argue that it was because there were other issues), and not to late, as it would seem he was panicing. So the right time was obviously tuesday morning, approx 2 weeks before the deadline, and in that light, I agree. The thing just is, the timing is never right to announce a delay for the third time, and we as shareholders paid the price with the sell of tuesday.

Now that the bad news about the delay has hit us, I think that AE will take the time to complete the work properly. Consequently I don't expect the PEA release untill sometime mid february, and I'm okay with that.

Basicly I'm not worried about delays, when there's a good positive reason for them. And everything points to the fact that there are indeed reason to be optimistic about the economics regarding the process optimization. So all is good.

Allow me to jump to another issue, that's been on my mind.

I wondered, if I was AE and was in contact with +25 end users that wanted to buy my product at a premium price, but costumized to suit every customer's needs, I would make damn sure that I was able to deliver that individualized product to each customer, before I released a PEA based on the discussed prices. I mean, it's one thing to agree to sell a product at a certain price, if you're confident about the processing costs, but when it's a unique product and a novel process, I would wait untill I was sure that I could deliver. The opposite would be irresponsible, and it would probably only take the bashers 2 seconds to figure out how to attack ZEN by argueing that the PEA was based on selling products at premium prices, and not being able to produce the products. Compared to that scenario, I prefer a delay any day.

Another important issue probably is, that it might be hard to get an attractive boyout offer when it's up to the buyer to figure out how to purify the product - and that might be another good reason for the exessive tweaking of the production process, compared to what's normal for a PEA. When the production process is optimized ZEN can say; here's the product, and here's how you produce it - now, show us the moneyyyyyy.

Thanks for your patience!

GLTA