That’s the second day all done and dusted.
I’m just about done.
Everyone was flagging today and the crowd in the conference hall visibly thinned out.
I spent the afternoon at a separate resources conference that was taking place nearby. It involved fund managers and some of the mining companies from the Mines & Money conference.
I managed to get a lot of one-on-one time with management in one sitting. It was like speed-dating with resource stocks.
That was kind of the focus for me today, chatting to management…I hit up about 25 companies. I can’t talk about them here, but I’ve got a stack of new ideas for Diggers & Drillers.
I made sure not to miss the unmissable Robert Friedland talk this morning. He promoted his Ivanplats Ltd [TSX: IVP] company. I need to take a closer look at this, but if I got the right end of the stick he has some monumentally big projects, or ‘disruptive’ projects as he called them.
The main one is a platinum, palladium, rhodium, gold, copper, and nickel mine in South Africa that he described as being bigger than the world’s two gold companies – Barrick Gold [NYSE: ABX] and Newmont [NYSE: NEM] – put together. He’s not one to talk things down! Whereas the width of the average platinum seam is a metre, he described this as being 20 metres thick.
He goes on to say it’s the largest precious metals asset globally for a hundred years.
The other two mines in the group are a copper project and a zinc project in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Both sound immense. I don’t know how he does this – find all these ridiculously big assets all the time.
He’s the one that got the Oyu Tolgoi mine up and running (with some help from Rio Tinto) in Mongolia.
He’s also bullish on Sub-Saharan African growth in the next decade. He says it could resemble the China story in terms of urbanisation and industrialisation – leading it to being a source of demand, not just a source of commodities. Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Congo, Ghana, Zambia, and Nigeria should all be in the top ten countries for the first half of this decade.
Interesting stuff.
Ethiopia – who’d have guessed that was the third-fastest growing economy in the world? It’s also where China built the new African Union building, and has seen a great deal of foreign direct investment from China. Maybe connected?
And when asked about South Africa or Democratic Republic of Congo as risky places to do business, Friedland said he’d rather be there than Australia. He said, ‘do you trust that redhead?’
On that note, goodbye from Hong Kong.
Dr Alex Cowie
Editor, Diggers & Drillers
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