Liontown Brand Guidelines: The Perth Lithium Miner Behind Kathleen Valley

A Perth explorer with a lion in its name.

Liontown is a lithium miner based in West Perth, Western Australia, whose shares trade on the Australian Securities Exchange under the code LTR. The company says it took the name Liontown Resources Limited in 2006, ahead of its first listing on the ASX, and that over the following nineteen years it became widely known simply as “Liontown.” Its notice of the November 2025 annual meeting asked shareholders to approve a shorter legal name, Liontown Limited, to align the company with the brand it already used; its website now carries the name Liontown Ltd.

For most of its life Liontown was an explorer. Its fortunes turned on Kathleen Valley, a hard-rock lithium deposit in the Northern Goldfields of Western Australia, about 60 kilometres north of Leinster and 680 kilometres north-east of Perth, on the country of the Tjiwarl Traditional Owners. Mining Technology reported in 2023 that the deposit lies on the western edge of the Norseman-Wiluna greenstone belt and hosts its lithium in pegmatite dykes rich in spodumene, the lithium-bearing mineral that hard-rock miners concentrate. The company’s resource statements also report tantalum in the deposit.

The company’s own timeline for Kathleen Valley lists a maiden drilling programme in 2017, a defined Mineral Resource in 2018, and a definitive feasibility study and a native title agreement in 2021. In 2022 the board made its final investment decision, construction began, and Liontown signed offtake agreements with Tesla, Ford and LG Energy Solution, the South Korean battery maker. The law firm Allens, which advised Liontown, listed among that work a debt facility with Ford and, later, a strategic partnership with LG Energy Solution that included a convertible note and an extension of the offtake.

A takeover bid, then first production.

Kathleen Valley also drew a bidder. Albemarle, the US lithium producer, first proposed to acquire Liontown in October 2022 and revised its proposal several times, Mining Technology reported. In early September 2023 it made what it called a best and final offer, according to a Bloomberg report carried by The Star. Over the following weeks Hancock Prospecting built up a stake of 19.9 per cent, making it Liontown’s largest shareholder, with enough weight, The Star reported, to potentially block a vote on the deal.

On 16 October 2023 Albemarle withdrew. Liontown’s statement to the stock exchange said Albemarle had cited “the growing complexities associated with executing the transaction,” and Albemarle said the decision was in line with its disciplined approach to capital allocation, Mining Technology reported. Within days Liontown announced a package of new equity and debt to complete Kathleen Valley, Mining Technology reported.

Construction carried on. Liontown later said Kathleen Valley achieved first concentrate production in July 2024; in September 2024 Allens described the milestone as the completion of Liontown’s evolution from explorer to producer. At the end of that month Small Caps reported that the first shipment of spodumene concentrate had left the port of Geraldton for China, for an existing offtake customer, alongside a first sale on the spot market. The company says the site is linked by sealed highways to the port of Geraldton, from which its concentrate is shipped.

The mine itself changed shape. The company says Kathleen Valley was once designed as a large open pit, but that it chose to mine underground. On 8 April 2025 it announced that underground production stoping had begun at the Mt Mann orebody, and it describes Kathleen Valley as Australia’s first underground lithium mine. In September 2025 it said open-pit mining would end that December and that the operation would become fully underground in 2026. The site runs on a hybrid power station that the company says combines wind, solar, battery storage and gas.

Design and documentation.

Lithium and battery-materials companies sell to other companies, not to shoppers, and their imagery is built for investors, carmakers and governments as much as for the public. Most of it starts at the source. Brine producers show their evaporation ponds from the air: long rectangles of turquoise, green and pale yellow laid out across a white salt flat, with mountains on the horizon. Hard-rock miners show open pits cut in terraces into red or ochre earth, haul trucks on the benches and stockpiles of pale spodumene ore.

The next layer is chemistry. Company photographs move indoors to white lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide powders held in gloved hands or poured from a scoop, bulk bags stacked in a warehouse, and the long kilns and furnaces of refineries and cathode-material plants. These images carry the industry’s main argument: that a mineral dug or pumped in one country becomes a battery-grade chemical in another.

The end use usually appears last, and it is almost always the same: battery cells, electric cars, charging cables and grid-scale storage containers. The pictures show where the material is meant to go.

Much of the visual language is corporate rather than consumer. Investor-day slides and annual reports lean on world maps dotted with mines, plants and offices, flow charts of the supply chain from resource to cathode, and the logos of listing exchanges. Industry gatherings such as Fastmarkets’ Lithium Supply and Battery Raw Materials conference bring producers, refiners and buyers into the same rooms, and the same maps and pond photographs reappear on stage. In a sector where few people see the product, the identity rests on landscapes, laboratories and the cars at the end of the chain.

A stylised name and a goldfields mine.

Liontown has kept growing the operation. On 29 September 2026 its board made the final investment decision on the Kathleen Valley Expansion, which the company says will debottleneck a process plant that was designed and built to scale up, with the first additional tonnes expected in its 2028 financial year. Its offtake partners now include Canmax Technologies alongside LG Energy Solution, Tesla and Ford, the company says, and its project list also names Buldania in Western Australia.

It has also looked beyond hard rock. On 1 September 2026 Liontown announced a binding farm-in agreement with NEXT Lithium Corp. to earn up to 100 per cent of the Centenario lithium brine exploration project in Salta Province, Argentina, in stages over four years. The initial payments fall due once the agreement becomes unconditional: the farm-in was agreed in August 2026, announced on 1 September 2026, and is not completed at the time of writing.

The identity is built on the name. Liontown’s 2025 notice of meeting says the company logo is a stylised “Liontown,” a wordmark rather than a symbol, and the change to the shorter Liontown Limited was proposed to match the corporate entity to that brand. At Kathleen Valley the company named its accommodation the Dragonfly Village, after a Tjiwarl story of dragonfly hunters who chased a great serpent into nearby Jones Creek, which the company presents as a mark of respect for the Traditional Owners.

For a design guide, Liontown shows how a junior explorer can let a single name carry it from drilling to production. Compare Albemarle, the producer whose takeover proposal it saw withdrawn, and PLS, another Western Australian spodumene miner. For this guide we use an ochre, a sand and a saltbush green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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