With over 15 years of experience in commodity markets, Colin leads BMO’s market intelligence and price forecasting efforts across base metals, bulk commodities, precious metals and battery raw materials. His background as a metallurgist with a strong focus on China and global trade flows, and deep subject knowledge. Why did you decide to join the Mining Indaba Advisory Board? Mining Indaba is an extremely important event in the calendar for all stakeholders in metals and mining. I’m passionate about content, I believe it’s important to keep the conference relevant to global markets and ensure that participants are going to learn something by attending it. I’m a believer that conferences are there for greater learning, and people should be there to widen their knowledge.

What are you most excited about being on the Advisory Board?
The ability to interact with my peers at the top of the industry and help shape the conference.
 
How would you like to shape the Mining Indaba event?
I would like it to offer something for everyone, it’s a great event for getting people together from all geographies and industries. I want to bring together what I have in terms of global market expertise to try and help plan for the future because at the end of the day that what we’re all trying to do.
 
In terms of the industry, where will the financing for mining projects come from in the coming years?
I believe there will be a widespread portfolio of financing going forward. Firstly, we’re seeing more of the classical project finance particularly coming out of the Asian economies. Trade finance is another option as commodity traders are continuing to make money in this current period and looking to own hard assets to serve that business.
 
On the other hand, there is still a place for classic debt and equity financing, albeit on a more selective basis than in the past. We’re seeing more of a trend with private equity than public equity in the mining industry and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
 
What trends are we seeing across M&A in the global and African sector?
M&As is starting to pick back up, there’s a lot of interest coming through again and increasing due diligence being done. It has been hampered a little bit in some case with global restrictions and travel bans limiting potential due diligence.
 
The gold industry saw a mega-merger a few years ago and we’re now starting to see more consolidation in the mid-tier sector which will then flow down to the junior mining sector. The industry is seeing a trend of M&A on the gold side and in terms of other areas, it’s been slow to pick up. However, there are a lot of miners with much better balance sheets than we’ve seen in the past. I would note that there are definitely more questions around growth coming through again given the current strong commodity prices.

What are the top commodities in 2021 to look out for? Is there one that stands out for the best investment potential for this year?
On the commodity side, the energy transition is an area where we’re getting a lot of queries through – definitely an area of interest. It will be an important year for the nickel market, with very strong demand for growth. South Africa has a very dominant supply of the PGMs with record prices for a lot of the PGM miners currently. Minerals like rhodium with its use in hydrogen catalysis is one we are seeing a lot more work being done on.  Even if commodity prices don’t stay at the current levels in metals such as gold, iron-ore, and copper as we’re looking at extremely strong producer margins compared to historical norms.
 
What are the top alternative financing options for mining companies this year?
Sustainable finance is a new finance option which is coming increasingly to the forefront. There’s a huge rise in sustainable funds under management and green bonds being issued as well as banks offering differential rates for projects that meet certain sustainable metrics. However, it does depend on the individual project.  We see a lot more financing available for reducing the carbon intensity of mining.
 
Sustainable finance is something that the largest producers in the mining industry are becoming more involved in, I think it could be something that can be rolled out a lot more widely. There are also the social benefits you can get from sustainability linked finance which would be a great benefit for the African mining sector.

For more information on the expansion of the 2022 Advisory Board and to see all members, please click here.