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Well, good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to today's panel on opportunities in the Australian mining equity space for 2025.
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I'm Danica Warburton from Investability, an IR firm in Sydney, and delighted to be joined today by an esteemed panel of experts here.
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First, we have John Forwood.
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the Chief Investment Officer at Llewell Resources Funds Management.
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So John's background has been managing natural resources portfolio successfully over multiple different market cycles.
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Previously a lawyer and geologist by background.
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And...
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These days he's most known for identifying and investing in early stage mining projects.
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And most of these have delivered some substantial returns, haven't they?
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Some of them.
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Next to John we've got Narmalee Mackay.
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I hope I pronounced that right.
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Narmalee is the Manning Director of the Critical Minerals Association of Australia.
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She's a key advocate for sustainable mining.
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with extensive experience in policy and partnerships and this is really shaping the future of Critical Minerals.
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So we're very excited to hear your insights.
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And our third panelist here is Richard Smezian.
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He's the managing director of private equity firm Benelong Venture Capital.
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Richard has founded and directed several ASX listed resources companies and has played a pivotal role advancing early-stage exploration companies into producers
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and take over targets.
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So we might just start and kick into the questions.
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Firstly, John, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on where you saw the Australian mining equities market in 2024.
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What were sort of your key performers or, you know, underperformers?
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Look, yeah, I think we're sort of almost back to where we started in terms of the start of the year.
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We've had a couple of little runs in the market.
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The first that I noticed was back in April, May, when most of the metal complex, the base metals and the precious metals, ran together just for, you know, five or six weeks or so.
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And that gave the market a good uptick.
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And I sort of put one of the reasons for that down to oil traders, the really big oil traders, getting back into the metals market.
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But unfortunately, that was fairly short-lived.
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The market came off again.
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And then we had another run in sort of pre-the US election in sort of September, October with US cutting interest rates and China stimulus.
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And that gave the market a bit of a run.
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But unfortunately...
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You know, the election happened and things pulled back again.
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But we're now maybe on a run back up to Chris.
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But net-net, I don't think we've really come very far in terms of the market.
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I think, you know, this year has been a very tough year for transition medals.
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and obviously a much better year for precious metals.
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So gold and silver have been much better performers in our portfolio than the battery metal complex.
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And being in the sort of critical mineral space, John mentioned that maybe the sector's underperformed expectations this year.
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Where do you see the industry evolving for 2025?
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Well, this is the million-dollar question.
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I wish I could answer it.
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But, yeah, exactly.
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As John said, you know, it's been a very challenging year for the critical minerals industry and all of the minerals and metals that go with that.
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You know, you've seen pricing being a major issue as well as, you know, a lot of shutdowns.
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And so, I mean...
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At the risk of being very pessimistic, I mean, for our industry, it just feels like we're still struggling with financing some of the junior end and getting some of those resources off, you know, out of the ground.
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So we remain hopeful that government will step in in a more structured way to encourage a lot more of the private, you know,
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private investment into this area, that's where there are some real bottlenecks.
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So, not really answering your question, but there are significantly more challenges at the moment than there are lights at the end of the tunnel.
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Yeah.
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And Richard, we saw a few days ago that Australia's largest listed gold company, Northern Star, take over De Grey.
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Where do you think in terms of the market cycle we're sitting?
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That's a very good question, and I think John may have different, everyone's got different views of this commodity cycle, but some people say that we've had the big crash or the downward cycle one or two years ago, but we saw that with lithium as well.
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Lithium sort of had a boom year last year, but we had the tail end of that, that's gone down.
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This year it's been gold, so gold's been booming.
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So I think John was saying before to me, there's sub-cycles within this cycle, but I think
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There's cash takeovers and bids.
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That on the cycle, if you've got 12 o'clock is a crash, then you've got declining expiration, you know, times are bad, blah, blah, blah.
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Now we're starting to see mergers and acquisitions happening.
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It could be at 5am and when you get to 6, you're starting to get boom.
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But we need a trigger to get that boom going.
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So I think we're not far away from some sort of an uplift, but we need some sort of a trigger to push it up.
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It might be, again, gold prices or critical metal prices moving up.
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It could be one geopolitical event that changes that and we get that run up.
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So it might not be far away.
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It might be an hour away from a...
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for exciting times ahead.
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I don't know.
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Something I've noticed, just if you compare the number of IPOs this year to last year on the ASX in terms of resources, there's been maybe 10.
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2023, there was...
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almost none uh so there's been a little uptick in ipos but certainly this year i can count a huge number more of uh share consolidations than than ipos so i think that sort of indicates we're still you know in a in a very tough market and i guess to follow up on that the the capital hurdle for juniors john um
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you know, it's been pretty hard for management teams year on year.
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How should these junior miners approach this issue going forward, do you think?
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Yeah, I think that is a real contributing factor to why junior miners are pretty undervalued, in my view, at the moment, is the market can see that they've perhaps, you know, we've got a project with a big capital hurdle and it's
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very difficult for a $20 million market cap company to raise $200 million of capex.
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And it's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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If the market doesn't think you can do it, then your share price will go down, you've got less chance of doing it.
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So one thing that we, you know, one of the investment theses that we are pursuing is looking at projects that have a dual potential outcome.
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Hopefully these projects might get the critical mass to become standalone projects, but they're also in areas where there's enough infrastructure and enough processing capacity that if they don't get that critical mass, they can have a very low capital solution of truck and toll treat.
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And the WA Goldfields is a very good example of that.
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So we've pursued a number of opportunities which we think have got that sort of potential.
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And, Mali, with your role as the head of the Critical Minerals Association, which is positioning, I guess, one of its objectives is to position Australia as an attractive jurisdiction for a mining investment.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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Perhaps you could give a couple of examples or one example of some of the things that your association does.
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Yeah, sure.
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So, I mean, one of the things we're working on at the moment is a, some of you might be aware the government's put forward a critical minerals production tax incentive, which is designed to sort of boost the midstream.
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So effectively, you know, the policy position is that rather than just the dig and ship, we're trying to get into more of the value add and encourage industry to go into the value add.
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mechanism, this tax incentive is designed to boost some of that midstream processing.
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So one of the things that we're actively working with government and industry on is really trying to make sure we get the design of that right because, I mean, we have concerns that this might, you know, it's sort of a cut and paste from the US perspective.
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IRA model of the tax incentive there, but we're concerned that the problem for Australia is that we don't have a downstream demand.
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We are still struggling at the upstream end on the critical mineral side, and so we don't want to incentivise the wrong investors to,
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in accessing that tax incentive.
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So that's just one example of something that we're really quite focused on in terms of getting the money flowing correctly.
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Tannik, if I could just ask a question, Namaelie, the problem I think, John, we face as the exploration investors is where's the incentives by the government to help that?
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The explorers, we've got a resource, but we need a bit more funding.
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Is there facilities now available in Australia or are we always going to be tapping the equity markets or a Rio who's going to take all the project off your hands and there's no upside there?
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This is such a good question and it's something we...
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I don't want to use the word lobby, but we are actively advocating for.
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You're absolutely right.
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To some extent, why are we focused on the midstream at this point when we have some serious issues in the upstream with the juniors in the critical minerals environment?
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So the government has got a number of...
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programs, I guess, and grants, not much equity, a lot of debt funding options for the juniors in the upstream and not all of them can access it.
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But the problem is, is that this is, you know, we all know this is not a level playing field for these juniors trying to get into this space.
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It's a highly unlevel playing field.
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So we think government really needs to be a lot more creative and a lot more interventionist in finding ways to prop up that end of the supply chain to get it moving fast because we're in a race against time.
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So, yeah, I agree with you.
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I think there are, on the state government level, and it's not just in Australia, but state governments, I think all of them have drilling grants, which are generally dollar for dollar.
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And some of them go further than that.
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Some of them have grants for geophysics.
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Some even have, like WA has a grant for heritage surveys, because heritage has got so much of a cost.
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And Tasmania has a helicopter fund.
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I'm not sure if the Premier has a helicopter company, but you can access that.
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And other sort of maybe more, you know, less standard or more innovative solutions, there is quite a bit of drill for equity going on.
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So drilling companies who have, you know, the ones that have been profitable, you know, going or, you know, participating in the drilling risk by saying we'll take 30, 40, you know, 50% of our drilling fees in equity in shares.
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So there are a few ways around it.
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But at the end of the day, the exploration company still has to come up with hard dollars.
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Yeah.
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I think that's a good point.
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We just had one company do a million dollars in drilling equity.
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Our investors put $2.3 million in and got $140,000 from the government to drill a couple of holes for copper.
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So I think that's a good point, John.
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And there is that funding available.
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It's sort of like a package or sort of a couple of stages of funding that's available.
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So, yeah, I think that's – I didn't realise that is a funding option in Australia.
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A lot of drillers will do the work for equity.
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So –
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that's like a cash injection.
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And they're the ones who see the rocks coming out of the ground first.
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Yeah, and I mean, I guess the thing to keep in mind is that Australia is competing against, like, very different levels of government support in countries like Canada, the US and China.
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You know, those, and that's what we're up against.
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So, it's a lot more, it's a lot easier to get up and running.
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Not necessarily easy, full stop, but yeah.
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So there's some really big considerations there.
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And I guess moving to the outlook for next year, Richard, what are your sort of top picks in terms of commodities or even sub-sectors that you're liking?
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I'm going to be an investor in John's fund because he's doing very well.
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Precious metals, I think, is a no-brainer.
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Obviously, John's in that gold and precious metals.
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Yeah.
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But sometimes you've got to be a bit of contrarian investor.
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Look, critical metals, again, I think John was saying about subsets.
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You can't just say all critical metals is in the toilet, right, like lithium at the moment.
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What about zinc when Trafigura has a contract and it can't deliver into the warehouse or some sort of news like that?
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Zinc then goes for a run or copper might go for a run.
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The other day we saw G7,
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may sanction Russian palladium.
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Now palladium went for run, palladium is down this year so we're looking at, we've got palladium projects, we've got exposure to silver, we think copper because copper is required for a lot of our defence uses and a lot of the EV, also zinc as well which is on the critical metals list in the US but not necessarily on the Australian one so I think it's those down and out ones that you can pick some good ones but I think
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Gold and silver, especially with the geopolitical issues.
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South Korea the other day had a martial law.
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I mean, these are stuff where people are going to run to.
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So I think gold and silver, definitely with the geopolitical risks.
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I was just going to add, so from a critical minerals point of view, while, you know, there is a depressed kind of outlook where you have, let's say, for example, a critical mineral attached to a base metal like, you know, gold and antimony, just as an example.
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It's probably going to be easier than a critical metal on its own.
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And also on your geopolitics point, China obviously put those bans in place this week for antimony, germanium, gallium.
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You know, maybe there's an opportunity for us there if the US needs to source antimony and some of those.
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So, you know, it's all very volatile.
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Yeah, just those three metals that you talked about there that China's just put a US ban on.
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I think you can just dig down a bit more granularity there.
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I like gallium because it doesn't have to go into China to be processed.
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Generally, I understand it goes with zinc cons and you can process zinc outside of China.
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Whereas, say, Antimony, you know, the price has skyrocketed, but you do have to, the only processing option for an Antimony con is in China.
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So I think, yeah, gallium and germanium, pretty interesting, very niche, but pretty interesting.
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The other one, I just went to visit EQ Resources' tungsten mine in northern Spain.
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And those guys, you know, they're hitting production records, doing really well operationally.
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And they're saying the traders and the off-takers are begging them for more supply.
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um they can't and they can't meet it they said just give us anything that's lying around on the floor in the processing plant you know off spec doesn't matter so i think going into 2025 tungsten and and you know there's a lot of really interesting drivers for tungsten um you know that uh that's one that looks quite positive
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I think there's already signals out there on these.
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The US and the Chinese are already, you can already see where they're going.
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Like we were in rare earths before.
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Yeah, rare earths is critical, but it's hard.
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We've seen how many disasters in Australia is involved with rare earths.
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One went to a half a billion market cap, Twiggy Forest came in, but it's a billion dollar CapEx.
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So, you know, if you're going to get involved in these critical metals areas, you've got to, I think you've got to get in and get out.
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So you have to be a short term view.
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The other one is graphite.
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I mean, you can see where they're coming.
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The signal's already there.
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They're saying palladium.
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We don't want people buying palladium from the Russians.
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What about nickel?
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Nobody loves nickel today.
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You know, could we see a spike in nickel?
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We just, you know, there's so many things that are happening.
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We can't predict next year what it is, but you can see that it could happen, and then they'll go for a spike, and everyone's going to jump on that bandwagon.
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It's interesting times, but I think that geopolitical, the signals are already coming out there to don't buy these particular metals, or we're going to put a halt on the sale.
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So you can actually start to see where things are heading.
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And normally within the space or the context of sort of sustainability and the critical minerals industry, what sort of, you know, advancements or other sort of key drivers do you think we're going to see next year?
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So this is just an incredibly complex space, the ESG dimension.
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And actually, I don't know what both of you think about it, but...
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The northern hemisphere is supposedly driving some of that consumer need for ESG credentials and traceability and all of that.
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It's not materialised in terms of cost.
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So it really is going to be something that even junior miners have to just accept as a business as usual issue
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cost and it will probably pay dividends in the long run but I think we have to be careful that it doesn't become an overbearing cost you know there's now this I was sitting in on the panel yesterday where the there's a move to consolidate all of the ESG standards into one
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standard and yeah potentially that's that's a good thing um because it can be quite onerous and um yeah there are technological advances but this is such a complex area yeah and pricing it in is very very tough yeah John what what influence do sustainability you know and credentials and that sort of thing do they have any bearing on your portfolio decisions
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Yeah, look, definitely.
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You've got to, you know, just from a pure economic point of view, it's very important, as we saw with the notorious McPhillamy's decision in New South Wales just recently.
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If you can't be confident that you're going to be able to tick all the ESG boxes, then, you know, you run into, risk running into a real brick wall.
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So, you know, while, as Manly said, you know, the end users are not paying attention
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extra for um you know green metal if you like um in general um that if you don't um have those credentials then you won't have any metal at all
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I'd just like to add on that.
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Are we going to see a shift now away from ESG now that, well, fortunately or unfortunately, you've got Donald Trump in, and I had a stock was Trilogy in Alaska, and ESG prevented that project from going forward.
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And as soon as Trump got in, he said, no, we're going to approve that road and go through all that environmental issues, and the stock went up three times.
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Are we going to start saying we've got to wind back some of these ESG credentials?
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It's very important, but we're competing with China and Africa, and I don't know what the Russians are doing down there as well, but where are their ESGs?
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They're just building and they're taking things out.
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So is there going to be a change where the US are going to relax those ESGs and the rest of us have to...
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look at that.
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If you want to develop, we've got to relax some of these ESG things.
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It's too hard otherwise for a junior company to get through those hurdles.
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Yeah, it's interesting to see a number of the Republican states actually suing BlackRock for, you know, hampering some of their investing companies by requiring them to, you know, jump through ESG hoops, particularly, obviously, in fossil fuels.
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But I think, you know,
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It's a many-layered permitting process in the US in particular.
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You know, Trump can do one thing, but, you know, mining has a very local impact, and it is always going to come down to the people on the ground, the local county, the state, and if they don't like it, you know, they can... And then Indigenous groups, if they don't like it, they can certainly block it.
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And also I think consumers, there is a shift in consumer expectation.
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It's not quite translating yet, but it is very strong and it is there.
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So how that feeds into the supply chain will be interesting in the context of this change of political environment that you're talking about.
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But I think it's essential and why are we doing it?
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Are we doing it to tick the boxes or are we actually, you know, we have a serious problem that we've got to address on our hands?
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I wonder if China has an ESG policy in their production of metals and rare earths
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That's what we're competing with.
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That's my concern.
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I'm sure there is some good ESG in China, but when we were doing rare earths, they were just dumping all that acid down the river and it's like, well, how do you compete with that?
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I think that's the difficulty.
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So you've got two different worlds that you're working in.
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Absolutely.
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You've got to have that much better project, better grade, better metallurgy, you know, to really compete.
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I wanted to throw it to the audience to see if there was any questions that you might have.
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I'll come over.
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Yeah, I'd just like to pick up on that point you're just talking about, about ESG.
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And I'm a mining investor.
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I invest in mining companies all over the world, often sort of late stage exploration, sort of early development stage.
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And I have a bit.
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The ASX is my favorite market because of the amount of liquidity there is on the ASX and the amount of knowledge there is on ASX investors, including retail investors.
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But the biggest problem I have is the process.
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that juniors go through having made a discovery hole to taking that forward into funding.
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And the biggest hold-ups are with traditional owner issues and environmental issues.
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And of course, you know, we're all concerned about those issues in a general sense, but it's a question of degree.
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And when I look at the details and I talk to the managers of some of these companies and the problems they go through with traditional owners and people trying to make money out of ever more lengthy surveys and going into almost ridiculous details.
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on some of the floor and fauna issues.
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That's the thing that puts me off about the ASX the most.
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And the ASX is my favorite market.
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And I think, you know, I'm sort of guessing
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that part of the problem is that there's a bit of an industry now amongst environmentalists and environmental scientists and traditional owner companies that they actually make quite a lot of money out of elongating the approval processes for these projects.
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And I just wonder if you had any kind of thoughts around that?
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I'm not sure about that so much as it falls sort of within, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, the government structure that's built around that.
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So there's almost, and you might have a different view, there's a bit of that, but also the requirement to comply.
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And I
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it could be managed better and this is you know part of this long process that companies have to go through in order to access someone like you needs to be streamlined in some way and quick yeah and then I think that yeah that's no it doesn't and that's where the
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Yeah, absolutely.
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But if I could jump in there, I 100% agree with you.
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I mean, we've been exploring the Pilbara for 40 years where you could just bring a rig before and drill.
253
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Now you need approvals.
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But let me tell you, where we are in the Pilbara, like De Grey and Artemis, don't worry about that.
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Your share price is going from $0.05 to $2 on the back of a 12 million ounce discovery in a tier one jurisdiction, which the majors want.
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They're not going to go to Mali...
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They're going to go to Western Australia.
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It's tier one.
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You've got mining infrastructure.
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You've got the mining people.
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And you get 10 baggers, and I'm sure John's done, in Australia.
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But in Africa, the problem you're going to have there is, are you going to have your lithium deposit taken away by the Zimbabwean or the Chinese group?
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So it's quid pro quo.
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But I think Western Australia has delivered already probably 10...
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10 baggers in the last two years.
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I mean, maybe John knows more than I.
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So as an investor, maybe you don't want to be hanging around for the end of the mine.
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You don't have to.
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Azul got taken over in 18 months from $20 million to $3 billion.
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Without a resource.
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Without a resource.
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You're out by then.
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Yeah, what's the role of AI technology into the union mining space?
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There is some of companies adopting AI technology to analyzing their data to finding a target.
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So why do you think that will help to the union mining space?
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In terms of exploration, I know there's quite a bit of work going on there.
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And, you know, Bill Gates and Bezos are involved in, you know, AI exploration companies.
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There's a number in Australia as well.
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Look, I'm not aware of any major discoveries that have been made.
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just using AI, it might have helped.
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And one thing that these data processing AI technologies need is lots of data.
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So they tend to focus on areas that have already...
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had a lot of drilling and a lot of geophysics, you know, a lot of sampling, et cetera.
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So it's almost, you know, okay, we're going to find something where other things have been found already.
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So it's, I think it's hard for AI to generate targets in frontier fields where, you know, you find things like the degré, you know, the 12 million ounces that, you know, no one ever thought would be there.
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So it definitely has a role to play, but we're yet to see a major breakthrough using it.
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I'll just jump in there.
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Our guys just got a new software.
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I don't want to promote the name of it, but they used the AI to do the modelling.
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It had a resource, but they thought it was small.
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The resource is now 10 times the size because the AI calculated it faster and quicker.
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So that's what it's helping.
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As that Apple guy does say on Bloomberg, he has got AI.
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He says it's called actual intelligence.
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And that actual intelligence has discovered the Hemis, the Azores, Lithium, and hopefully our little company Artemis next to Gray.
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We're using actual intelligence with the AI modelling.
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So I don't think it's there yet where AI is going to say drill here, but you use that tool properly.
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to confirm the areas.
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Still need that.
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And I think that's where Western Australia and Australia has got this great advantage, that the technical abilities to make discoveries.
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I don't know, John.
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I mean, we're finding discoveries, four or five discoveries in the last four years, massive ones.
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So I think it plays a part, but you still need the people, I think.
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Okay, well, we might finish up with a round of rapid fire questions.
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So we'll go sort of from John down to Richard.
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What's one commodity you're most bullish on in 2025 and why?
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Look, I've already mentioned tungsten, but I think another one that we're looking hard at is silver.
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And that, you know, if it does move from trading on a more industrial metal basis to trading on more a bullion basis, you could see the ratio, gold-silver ratio, go from 80 to 1 to 35 to 1.
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And if that happened, you know, you'd be at 100 bucks silver.
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Namely?
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This is not something I really can comment on, so I'm going to pass.
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Yeah.
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Pass to it.
314
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
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I think John stole my point there, but we have that silver project which we talked about and that silver ratio, Peter Kruth from the silver guy in Zurich, you may have met him, he thinks the ratio can go down as 15 to 1.
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I mean, that's unbelievable.
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That's like 400, 500 bucks an ounce.
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Maybe not that high, but maybe...
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30 to 50, maybe that ratio changes.
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Silver guys are there.
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There's a lot of silver bugs out there.
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So I like silver, but also PGMs as a counter cyclical because we don't know when this band's going to come in, but they've already said no more palladium.
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You guys are not going to buy palladium from Russia.
324
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There could be a palladium PGM thing as well.
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So I think just keep an eye on where China and US are going to have these retaliatory trade sort of embargoes and tariffs and which ones of those are going to be affected.
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The other one that's a sleeper is zinc.
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No one's really talking about zinc, but zinc's actually performing better than copper and the Americans have got that on the critical metals list.
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So keep an eye on zinc and any spikes in those LME metals, which could happen.
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And you often get zinc with silver.
330
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Okay, and ESG, growth driver or challenge for mining companies?
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I think it's definitely more in the challenge basket.
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As alluded to, 22 odd years average to at least to bring a new mine into production in the Western world.
333
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Yeah, it's a massive challenge.
334
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challenge um just also because we haven't nailed the way we define the way we you know categorize what's green what's not can't even agree on a common standard like you know there's a there's a that all adds to the challenge of it but not to undermine the fact that it is a necessity
335
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challenge as a friend of mine Robert Freeland says sure get the ESG but then you have to tax put a tax on the the other guys who have not got ESG or pay a premium for your green copper it's not it's not happening so Robert's a very smart guy but that's the only way it's got to be equal playing field so it's a challenge all right and one Aussie mining company that you're watching closely in 2025 if you want to plug one
336
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That's very tough.
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But look, one of our larger investments is predictive discovery in Guinea and West Africa.
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We see a real catalyst there if and when, hopefully when, they get their mining concession granted.
339
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We could see that go into an M&A play.
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We've already seen Perseus take 19% and it could become an active M&A target once the mining concession is granted.
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passing that way too.
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I can't.
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Richard?
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Couldn't possibly pick.
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I like the Pilbara.
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I love the Pilbara.
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De Grey was amazing.
348
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That's gone.
349
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So the next cab off the rank in that North Pilbara Craton is Artemis.
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We've got a big position in Artemis.
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And I think there's more to be found.
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I think, like I said, four one billion plus discoveries in that little Pilbara Craton.
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There's more to come.
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It's not just Rio Tinta and BHP up there.
355
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There's gold, silver, PGM.
356
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So
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Artemis at one cent.
358
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Hopefully I'll be back here next year going, great prediction.
359
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And given the theme of this chat, which we'll wrap up in a second, in one sentence, what's your, you know, how would you describe the outlook for Australian mining equities over the next few years?
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Look, we very much focus on the juniors, and we've seen the juniors really underperform the cash-flowing companies.
361
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So, look, maybe it's optimistic, but I would hope to see the juniors try and make up some of that ground and get some revaluation into the micro and nano end.
362
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That'll be very much one of the big factors there is interest rates, more speculative money, more risk-tolerant money.
363
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keep on coming off, then we should see some better appetite for high-risk investing.
364
00:34:29.365 --> 00:34:35.187
Um, very similar point in that, you know, during this, you know, where are we in the cycle?
365
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You know, Richard, you're saying we're nearly on the move to the up.
366
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And I think this has been a period where a lot of the juniors, not a lot, some actually, only some, um, have used this time to like bring themselves up to commercialization or near commercialization.
367
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So I remain optimistic that there can be some, um, light at the end of this tunnel.
368
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I think as we discussed before, I think there's those little mini, mini booms.
369
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Like we were down in the dumps last year and then we had a lithium discovery.
370
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I mean there was a boom in lithium in Australia last year.
371
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This year it's probably gold.
372
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So I think the beauty for Australia is that whatever commodity gets sanctioned or spikes, Australia will move quickly in that area.
373
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So I think...
374
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I think the outlook's pretty good for Australia.
375
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We're in the mineral securities partnership with the UK and the US.
376
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Let's hope we can do a bit of friendshoring with Donald Trump.
377
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I'm hoping to go to Washington next year to see what the US can do.
378
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There is money coming from the US.
379
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So I think Australia is a secure, friendly country.
380
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western nation is going to play a really important part because you can go to africa as much as you want but if you're not in that libido corridor that they've got in all those safe countries then um you know good luck i mean good luck trying to go to western africa at the moment some part so i think australia is going to be really a focus for the major so find something and they will come and buy you out which is what's happening
381
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Well, thank you, John, Naomi and Richard for your valuable insights.
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It's been so wonderful to hear from you all.
383
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And I encourage the audience to reach out or, you know, come and say hello after this chat or reach out via LinkedIn or the, you know, the websites.
384
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And I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference.
385
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Thanks, everybody.
386
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Thanks, Danica.
387
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Thank you.
388
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Thanks, everyone.
389
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Thanks, Danica.
1
00:00:00.757 --> 00:00:09.005
Well, good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to today's panel on opportunities in the Australian mining equity space for 2025.
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I'm Danica Warburton from Investability, an IR firm in Sydney, and delighted to be joined today by an esteemed panel of experts here.
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First, we have John Forwood.
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the Chief Investment Officer at Llewell Resources Funds Management.
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So John's background has been managing natural resources portfolio successfully over multiple different market cycles.
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Previously a lawyer and geologist by background.
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And...
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These days he's most known for identifying and investing in early stage mining projects.
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And most of these have delivered some substantial returns, haven't they?
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Some of them.
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Next to John we've got Narmalee Mackay.
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I hope I pronounced that right.
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Narmalee is the Manning Director of the Critical Minerals Association of Australia.
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She's a key advocate for sustainable mining.
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with extensive experience in policy and partnerships and this is really shaping the future of Critical Minerals.
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So we're very excited to hear your insights.
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And our third panelist here is Richard Smezian.
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He's the managing director of private equity firm Benelong Venture Capital.
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Richard has founded and directed several ASX listed resources companies and has played a pivotal role advancing early-stage exploration companies into producers
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and take over targets.
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So we might just start and kick into the questions.
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Firstly, John, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on where you saw the Australian mining equities market in 2024.
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What were sort of your key performers or, you know, underperformers?
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Look, yeah, I think we're sort of almost back to where we started in terms of the start of the year.
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We've had a couple of little runs in the market.
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The first that I noticed was back in April, May, when most of the metal complex, the base metals and the precious metals, ran together just for, you know, five or six weeks or so.
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And that gave the market a good uptick.
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And I sort of put one of the reasons for that down to oil traders, the really big oil traders, getting back into the metals market.
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But unfortunately, that was fairly short-lived.
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The market came off again.
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And then we had another run in sort of pre-the US election in sort of September, October with US cutting interest rates and China stimulus.
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And that gave the market a bit of a run.
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But unfortunately...
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You know, the election happened and things pulled back again.
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But we're now maybe on a run back up to Chris.
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But net-net, I don't think we've really come very far in terms of the market.
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I think, you know, this year has been a very tough year for transition medals.
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and obviously a much better year for precious metals.
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So gold and silver have been much better performers in our portfolio than the battery metal complex.
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And being in the sort of critical mineral space, John mentioned that maybe the sector's underperformed expectations this year.
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Where do you see the industry evolving for 2025?
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Well, this is the million-dollar question.
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I wish I could answer it.
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But, yeah, exactly.
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As John said, you know, it's been a very challenging year for the critical minerals industry and all of the minerals and metals that go with that.
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You know, you've seen pricing being a major issue as well as, you know, a lot of shutdowns.
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And so, I mean...
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At the risk of being very pessimistic, I mean, for our industry, it just feels like we're still struggling with financing some of the junior end and getting some of those resources off, you know, out of the ground.
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So we remain hopeful that government will step in in a more structured way to encourage a lot more of the private, you know,
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private investment into this area, that's where there are some real bottlenecks.
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So, not really answering your question, but there are significantly more challenges at the moment than there are lights at the end of the tunnel.
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Yeah.
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And Richard, we saw a few days ago that Australia's largest listed gold company, Northern Star, take over De Grey.
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Where do you think in terms of the market cycle we're sitting?
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That's a very good question, and I think John may have different, everyone's got different views of this commodity cycle, but some people say that we've had the big crash or the downward cycle one or two years ago, but we saw that with lithium as well.
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Lithium sort of had a boom year last year, but we had the tail end of that, that's gone down.
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This year it's been gold, so gold's been booming.
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So I think John was saying before to me, there's sub-cycles within this cycle, but I think
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There's cash takeovers and bids.
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That on the cycle, if you've got 12 o'clock is a crash, then you've got declining expiration, you know, times are bad, blah, blah, blah.
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Now we're starting to see mergers and acquisitions happening.
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It could be at 5am and when you get to 6, you're starting to get boom.
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But we need a trigger to get that boom going.
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So I think we're not far away from some sort of an uplift, but we need some sort of a trigger to push it up.
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It might be, again, gold prices or critical metal prices moving up.
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It could be one geopolitical event that changes that and we get that run up.
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So it might not be far away.
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It might be an hour away from a...
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for exciting times ahead.
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I don't know.
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Something I've noticed, just if you compare the number of IPOs this year to last year on the ASX in terms of resources, there's been maybe 10.
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2023, there was...
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almost none uh so there's been a little uptick in ipos but certainly this year i can count a huge number more of uh share consolidations than than ipos so i think that sort of indicates we're still you know in a in a very tough market and i guess to follow up on that the the capital hurdle for juniors john um
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you know, it's been pretty hard for management teams year on year.
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How should these junior miners approach this issue going forward, do you think?
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Yeah, I think that is a real contributing factor to why junior miners are pretty undervalued, in my view, at the moment, is the market can see that they've perhaps, you know, we've got a project with a big capital hurdle and it's
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very difficult for a $20 million market cap company to raise $200 million of capex.
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And it's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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If the market doesn't think you can do it, then your share price will go down, you've got less chance of doing it.
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So one thing that we, you know, one of the investment theses that we are pursuing is looking at projects that have a dual potential outcome.
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Hopefully these projects might get the critical mass to become standalone projects, but they're also in areas where there's enough infrastructure and enough processing capacity that if they don't get that critical mass, they can have a very low capital solution of truck and toll treat.
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And the WA Goldfields is a very good example of that.
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So we've pursued a number of opportunities which we think have got that sort of potential.
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And, Mali, with your role as the head of the Critical Minerals Association, which is positioning, I guess, one of its objectives is to position Australia as an attractive jurisdiction for a mining investment.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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Perhaps you could give a couple of examples or one example of some of the things that your association does.
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Yeah, sure.
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So, I mean, one of the things we're working on at the moment is a, some of you might be aware the government's put forward a critical minerals production tax incentive, which is designed to sort of boost the midstream.
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So effectively, you know, the policy position is that rather than just the dig and ship, we're trying to get into more of the value add and encourage industry to go into the value add.
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mechanism, this tax incentive is designed to boost some of that midstream processing.
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So one of the things that we're actively working with government and industry on is really trying to make sure we get the design of that right because, I mean, we have concerns that this might, you know, it's sort of a cut and paste from the US perspective.
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IRA model of the tax incentive there, but we're concerned that the problem for Australia is that we don't have a downstream demand.
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We are still struggling at the upstream end on the critical mineral side, and so we don't want to incentivise the wrong investors to,
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in accessing that tax incentive.
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So that's just one example of something that we're really quite focused on in terms of getting the money flowing correctly.
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Tannik, if I could just ask a question, Namaelie, the problem I think, John, we face as the exploration investors is where's the incentives by the government to help that?
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The explorers, we've got a resource, but we need a bit more funding.
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Is there facilities now available in Australia or are we always going to be tapping the equity markets or a Rio who's going to take all the project off your hands and there's no upside there?
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This is such a good question and it's something we...
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I don't want to use the word lobby, but we are actively advocating for.
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You're absolutely right.
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To some extent, why are we focused on the midstream at this point when we have some serious issues in the upstream with the juniors in the critical minerals environment?
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So the government has got a number of...
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programs, I guess, and grants, not much equity, a lot of debt funding options for the juniors in the upstream and not all of them can access it.
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But the problem is, is that this is, you know, we all know this is not a level playing field for these juniors trying to get into this space.
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It's a highly unlevel playing field.
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So we think government really needs to be a lot more creative and a lot more interventionist in finding ways to prop up that end of the supply chain to get it moving fast because we're in a race against time.
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So, yeah, I agree with you.
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I think there are, on the state government level, and it's not just in Australia, but state governments, I think all of them have drilling grants, which are generally dollar for dollar.
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And some of them go further than that.
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Some of them have grants for geophysics.
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Some even have, like WA has a grant for heritage surveys, because heritage has got so much of a cost.
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And Tasmania has a helicopter fund.
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I'm not sure if the Premier has a helicopter company, but you can access that.
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And other sort of maybe more, you know, less standard or more innovative solutions, there is quite a bit of drill for equity going on.
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So drilling companies who have, you know, the ones that have been profitable, you know, going or, you know, participating in the drilling risk by saying we'll take 30, 40, you know, 50% of our drilling fees in equity in shares.
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So there are a few ways around it.
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But at the end of the day, the exploration company still has to come up with hard dollars.
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Yeah.
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I think that's a good point.
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We just had one company do a million dollars in drilling equity.
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Our investors put $2.3 million in and got $140,000 from the government to drill a couple of holes for copper.
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So I think that's a good point, John.
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And there is that funding available.
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It's sort of like a package or sort of a couple of stages of funding that's available.
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So, yeah, I think that's – I didn't realise that is a funding option in Australia.
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A lot of drillers will do the work for equity.
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So –
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that's like a cash injection.
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And they're the ones who see the rocks coming out of the ground first.
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Yeah, and I mean, I guess the thing to keep in mind is that Australia is competing against, like, very different levels of government support in countries like Canada, the US and China.
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You know, those, and that's what we're up against.
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So, it's a lot more, it's a lot easier to get up and running.
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Not necessarily easy, full stop, but yeah.
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So there's some really big considerations there.
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And I guess moving to the outlook for next year, Richard, what are your sort of top picks in terms of commodities or even sub-sectors that you're liking?
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I'm going to be an investor in John's fund because he's doing very well.
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Precious metals, I think, is a no-brainer.
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Obviously, John's in that gold and precious metals.
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Yeah.
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But sometimes you've got to be a bit of contrarian investor.
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Look, critical metals, again, I think John was saying about subsets.
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You can't just say all critical metals is in the toilet, right, like lithium at the moment.
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What about zinc when Trafigura has a contract and it can't deliver into the warehouse or some sort of news like that?
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Zinc then goes for a run or copper might go for a run.
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The other day we saw G7,
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may sanction Russian palladium.
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Now palladium went for run, palladium is down this year so we're looking at, we've got palladium projects, we've got exposure to silver, we think copper because copper is required for a lot of our defence uses and a lot of the EV, also zinc as well which is on the critical metals list in the US but not necessarily on the Australian one so I think it's those down and out ones that you can pick some good ones but I think
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Gold and silver, especially with the geopolitical issues.
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South Korea the other day had a martial law.
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I mean, these are stuff where people are going to run to.
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So I think gold and silver, definitely with the geopolitical risks.
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I was just going to add, so from a critical minerals point of view, while, you know, there is a depressed kind of outlook where you have, let's say, for example, a critical mineral attached to a base metal like, you know, gold and antimony, just as an example.
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It's probably going to be easier than a critical metal on its own.
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And also on your geopolitics point, China obviously put those bans in place this week for antimony, germanium, gallium.
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You know, maybe there's an opportunity for us there if the US needs to source antimony and some of those.
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So, you know, it's all very volatile.
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Yeah, just those three metals that you talked about there that China's just put a US ban on.
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I think you can just dig down a bit more granularity there.
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I like gallium because it doesn't have to go into China to be processed.
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Generally, I understand it goes with zinc cons and you can process zinc outside of China.
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Whereas, say, Antimony, you know, the price has skyrocketed, but you do have to, the only processing option for an Antimony con is in China.
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So I think, yeah, gallium and germanium, pretty interesting, very niche, but pretty interesting.
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The other one, I just went to visit EQ Resources' tungsten mine in northern Spain.
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And those guys, you know, they're hitting production records, doing really well operationally.
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And they're saying the traders and the off-takers are begging them for more supply.
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um they can't and they can't meet it they said just give us anything that's lying around on the floor in the processing plant you know off spec doesn't matter so i think going into 2025 tungsten and and you know there's a lot of really interesting drivers for tungsten um you know that uh that's one that looks quite positive
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I think there's already signals out there on these.
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The US and the Chinese are already, you can already see where they're going.
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Like we were in rare earths before.
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Yeah, rare earths is critical, but it's hard.
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We've seen how many disasters in Australia is involved with rare earths.
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One went to a half a billion market cap, Twiggy Forest came in, but it's a billion dollar CapEx.
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So, you know, if you're going to get involved in these critical metals areas, you've got to, I think you've got to get in and get out.
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So you have to be a short term view.
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The other one is graphite.
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I mean, you can see where they're coming.
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The signal's already there.
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They're saying palladium.
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We don't want people buying palladium from the Russians.
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What about nickel?
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Nobody loves nickel today.
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You know, could we see a spike in nickel?
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We just, you know, there's so many things that are happening.
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We can't predict next year what it is, but you can see that it could happen, and then they'll go for a spike, and everyone's going to jump on that bandwagon.
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It's interesting times, but I think that geopolitical, the signals are already coming out there to don't buy these particular metals, or we're going to put a halt on the sale.
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So you can actually start to see where things are heading.
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And normally within the space or the context of sort of sustainability and the critical minerals industry, what sort of, you know, advancements or other sort of key drivers do you think we're going to see next year?
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So this is just an incredibly complex space, the ESG dimension.
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And actually, I don't know what both of you think about it, but...
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The northern hemisphere is supposedly driving some of that consumer need for ESG credentials and traceability and all of that.
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It's not materialised in terms of cost.
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So it really is going to be something that even junior miners have to just accept as a business as usual issue
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cost and it will probably pay dividends in the long run but I think we have to be careful that it doesn't become an overbearing cost you know there's now this I was sitting in on the panel yesterday where the there's a move to consolidate all of the ESG standards into one
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standard and yeah potentially that's that's a good thing um because it can be quite onerous and um yeah there are technological advances but this is such a complex area yeah and pricing it in is very very tough yeah John what what influence do sustainability you know and credentials and that sort of thing do they have any bearing on your portfolio decisions
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Yeah, look, definitely.
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You've got to, you know, just from a pure economic point of view, it's very important, as we saw with the notorious McPhillamy's decision in New South Wales just recently.
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If you can't be confident that you're going to be able to tick all the ESG boxes, then, you know, you run into, risk running into a real brick wall.
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So, you know, while, as Manly said, you know, the end users are not paying attention
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extra for um you know green metal if you like um in general um that if you don't um have those credentials then you won't have any metal at all
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I'd just like to add on that.
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Are we going to see a shift now away from ESG now that, well, fortunately or unfortunately, you've got Donald Trump in, and I had a stock was Trilogy in Alaska, and ESG prevented that project from going forward.
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And as soon as Trump got in, he said, no, we're going to approve that road and go through all that environmental issues, and the stock went up three times.
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Are we going to start saying we've got to wind back some of these ESG credentials?
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It's very important, but we're competing with China and Africa, and I don't know what the Russians are doing down there as well, but where are their ESGs?
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They're just building and they're taking things out.
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So is there going to be a change where the US are going to relax those ESGs and the rest of us have to...
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look at that.
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If you want to develop, we've got to relax some of these ESG things.
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It's too hard otherwise for a junior company to get through those hurdles.
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Yeah, it's interesting to see a number of the Republican states actually suing BlackRock for, you know, hampering some of their investing companies by requiring them to, you know, jump through ESG hoops, particularly, obviously, in fossil fuels.
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But I think, you know,
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It's a many-layered permitting process in the US in particular.
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You know, Trump can do one thing, but, you know, mining has a very local impact, and it is always going to come down to the people on the ground, the local county, the state, and if they don't like it, you know, they can... And then Indigenous groups, if they don't like it, they can certainly block it.
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And also I think consumers, there is a shift in consumer expectation.
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It's not quite translating yet, but it is very strong and it is there.
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So how that feeds into the supply chain will be interesting in the context of this change of political environment that you're talking about.
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But I think it's essential and why are we doing it?
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Are we doing it to tick the boxes or are we actually, you know, we have a serious problem that we've got to address on our hands?
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I wonder if China has an ESG policy in their production of metals and rare earths
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That's what we're competing with.
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That's my concern.
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I'm sure there is some good ESG in China, but when we were doing rare earths, they were just dumping all that acid down the river and it's like, well, how do you compete with that?
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I think that's the difficulty.
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So you've got two different worlds that you're working in.
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Absolutely.
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You've got to have that much better project, better grade, better metallurgy, you know, to really compete.
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I wanted to throw it to the audience to see if there was any questions that you might have.
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I'll come over.
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Yeah, I'd just like to pick up on that point you're just talking about, about ESG.
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And I'm a mining investor.
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I invest in mining companies all over the world, often sort of late stage exploration, sort of early development stage.
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And I have a bit.
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The ASX is my favorite market because of the amount of liquidity there is on the ASX and the amount of knowledge there is on ASX investors, including retail investors.
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But the biggest problem I have is the process.
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that juniors go through having made a discovery hole to taking that forward into funding.
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And the biggest hold-ups are with traditional owner issues and environmental issues.
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And of course, you know, we're all concerned about those issues in a general sense, but it's a question of degree.
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And when I look at the details and I talk to the managers of some of these companies and the problems they go through with traditional owners and people trying to make money out of ever more lengthy surveys and going into almost ridiculous details.
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on some of the floor and fauna issues.
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That's the thing that puts me off about the ASX the most.
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And the ASX is my favorite market.
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And I think, you know, I'm sort of guessing
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that part of the problem is that there's a bit of an industry now amongst environmentalists and environmental scientists and traditional owner companies that they actually make quite a lot of money out of elongating the approval processes for these projects.
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And I just wonder if you had any kind of thoughts around that?
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I'm not sure about that so much as it falls sort of within, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, the government structure that's built around that.
247
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So there's almost, and you might have a different view, there's a bit of that, but also the requirement to comply.
248
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And I
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it could be managed better and this is you know part of this long process that companies have to go through in order to access someone like you needs to be streamlined in some way and quick yeah and then I think that yeah that's no it doesn't and that's where the
250
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Yeah, absolutely.
251
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But if I could jump in there, I 100% agree with you.
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I mean, we've been exploring the Pilbara for 40 years where you could just bring a rig before and drill.
253
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Now you need approvals.
254
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But let me tell you, where we are in the Pilbara, like De Grey and Artemis, don't worry about that.
255
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Your share price is going from $0.05 to $2 on the back of a 12 million ounce discovery in a tier one jurisdiction, which the majors want.
256
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They're not going to go to Mali...
257
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They're going to go to Western Australia.
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It's tier one.
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You've got mining infrastructure.
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You've got the mining people.
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And you get 10 baggers, and I'm sure John's done, in Australia.
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But in Africa, the problem you're going to have there is, are you going to have your lithium deposit taken away by the Zimbabwean or the Chinese group?
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So it's quid pro quo.
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But I think Western Australia has delivered already probably 10...
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10 baggers in the last two years.
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I mean, maybe John knows more than I.
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So as an investor, maybe you don't want to be hanging around for the end of the mine.
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You don't have to.
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Azul got taken over in 18 months from $20 million to $3 billion.
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Without a resource.
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Without a resource.
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You're out by then.
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Yeah, what's the role of AI technology into the union mining space?
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There is some of companies adopting AI technology to analyzing their data to finding a target.
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So why do you think that will help to the union mining space?
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In terms of exploration, I know there's quite a bit of work going on there.
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And, you know, Bill Gates and Bezos are involved in, you know, AI exploration companies.
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There's a number in Australia as well.
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Look, I'm not aware of any major discoveries that have been made.
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just using AI, it might have helped.
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And one thing that these data processing AI technologies need is lots of data.
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So they tend to focus on areas that have already...
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had a lot of drilling and a lot of geophysics, you know, a lot of sampling, et cetera.
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So it's almost, you know, okay, we're going to find something where other things have been found already.
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So it's, I think it's hard for AI to generate targets in frontier fields where, you know, you find things like the degré, you know, the 12 million ounces that, you know, no one ever thought would be there.
286
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So it definitely has a role to play, but we're yet to see a major breakthrough using it.
287
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I'll just jump in there.
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Our guys just got a new software.
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I don't want to promote the name of it, but they used the AI to do the modelling.
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It had a resource, but they thought it was small.
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The resource is now 10 times the size because the AI calculated it faster and quicker.
292
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So that's what it's helping.
293
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As that Apple guy does say on Bloomberg, he has got AI.
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He says it's called actual intelligence.
295
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And that actual intelligence has discovered the Hemis, the Azores, Lithium, and hopefully our little company Artemis next to Gray.
296
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We're using actual intelligence with the AI modelling.
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So I don't think it's there yet where AI is going to say drill here, but you use that tool properly.
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to confirm the areas.
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Still need that.
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And I think that's where Western Australia and Australia has got this great advantage, that the technical abilities to make discoveries.
301
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I don't know, John.
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I mean, we're finding discoveries, four or five discoveries in the last four years, massive ones.
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So I think it plays a part, but you still need the people, I think.
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Okay, well, we might finish up with a round of rapid fire questions.
305
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So we'll go sort of from John down to Richard.
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What's one commodity you're most bullish on in 2025 and why?
307
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Look, I've already mentioned tungsten, but I think another one that we're looking hard at is silver.
308
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And that, you know, if it does move from trading on a more industrial metal basis to trading on more a bullion basis, you could see the ratio, gold-silver ratio, go from 80 to 1 to 35 to 1.
309
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And if that happened, you know, you'd be at 100 bucks silver.
310
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Namely?
311
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This is not something I really can comment on, so I'm going to pass.
312
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Yeah.
313
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Pass to it.
314
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
315
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I think John stole my point there, but we have that silver project which we talked about and that silver ratio, Peter Kruth from the silver guy in Zurich, you may have met him, he thinks the ratio can go down as 15 to 1.
316
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I mean, that's unbelievable.
317
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That's like 400, 500 bucks an ounce.
318
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Maybe not that high, but maybe...
319
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30 to 50, maybe that ratio changes.
320
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Silver guys are there.
321
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There's a lot of silver bugs out there.
322
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So I like silver, but also PGMs as a counter cyclical because we don't know when this band's going to come in, but they've already said no more palladium.
323
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You guys are not going to buy palladium from Russia.
324
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There could be a palladium PGM thing as well.
325
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So I think just keep an eye on where China and US are going to have these retaliatory trade sort of embargoes and tariffs and which ones of those are going to be affected.
326
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The other one that's a sleeper is zinc.
327
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No one's really talking about zinc, but zinc's actually performing better than copper and the Americans have got that on the critical metals list.
328
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So keep an eye on zinc and any spikes in those LME metals, which could happen.
329
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And you often get zinc with silver.
330
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Okay, and ESG, growth driver or challenge for mining companies?
331
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I think it's definitely more in the challenge basket.
332
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As alluded to, 22 odd years average to at least to bring a new mine into production in the Western world.
333
00:31:41.493 --> 00:31:42.894
Yeah, it's a massive challenge.
334
00:31:45.048 --> 00:32:06.220
challenge um just also because we haven't nailed the way we define the way we you know categorize what's green what's not can't even agree on a common standard like you know there's a there's a that all adds to the challenge of it but not to undermine the fact that it is a necessity
335
00:32:08.768 --> 00:32:33.097
challenge as a friend of mine Robert Freeland says sure get the ESG but then you have to tax put a tax on the the other guys who have not got ESG or pay a premium for your green copper it's not it's not happening so Robert's a very smart guy but that's the only way it's got to be equal playing field so it's a challenge all right and one Aussie mining company that you're watching closely in 2025 if you want to plug one
336
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That's very tough.
337
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But look, one of our larger investments is predictive discovery in Guinea and West Africa.
338
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We see a real catalyst there if and when, hopefully when, they get their mining concession granted.
339
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We could see that go into an M&A play.
340
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We've already seen Perseus take 19% and it could become an active M&A target once the mining concession is granted.
341
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passing that way too.
342
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I can't.
343
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Richard?
344
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Couldn't possibly pick.
345
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I like the Pilbara.
346
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I love the Pilbara.
347
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De Grey was amazing.
348
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That's gone.
349
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So the next cab off the rank in that North Pilbara Craton is Artemis.
350
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We've got a big position in Artemis.
351
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And I think there's more to be found.
352
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I think, like I said, four one billion plus discoveries in that little Pilbara Craton.
353
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There's more to come.
354
00:33:26.644 --> 00:33:29.244
It's not just Rio Tinta and BHP up there.
355
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There's gold, silver, PGM.
356
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So
357
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Artemis at one cent.
358
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Hopefully I'll be back here next year going, great prediction.
359
00:33:39.093 --> 00:33:50.067
And given the theme of this chat, which we'll wrap up in a second, in one sentence, what's your, you know, how would you describe the outlook for Australian mining equities over the next few years?
360
00:33:51.056 --> 00:34:00.298
Look, we very much focus on the juniors, and we've seen the juniors really underperform the cash-flowing companies.
361
00:34:00.738 --> 00:34:12.081
So, look, maybe it's optimistic, but I would hope to see the juniors try and make up some of that ground and get some revaluation into the micro and nano end.
362
00:34:12.721 --> 00:34:18.302
That'll be very much one of the big factors there is interest rates, more speculative money, more risk-tolerant money.
363
00:34:20.983 --> 00:34:27.662
keep on coming off, then we should see some better appetite for high-risk investing.
364
00:34:29.365 --> 00:34:35.187
Um, very similar point in that, you know, during this, you know, where are we in the cycle?
365
00:34:35.647 --> 00:34:38.708
You know, Richard, you're saying we're nearly on the move to the up.
366
00:34:39.168 --> 00:34:51.673
And I think this has been a period where a lot of the juniors, not a lot, some actually, only some, um, have used this time to like bring themselves up to commercialization or near commercialization.
367
00:34:51.733 --> 00:34:57.895
So I remain optimistic that there can be some, um, light at the end of this tunnel.
368
00:34:58.713 --> 00:35:02.754
I think as we discussed before, I think there's those little mini, mini booms.
369
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Like we were down in the dumps last year and then we had a lithium discovery.
370
00:35:06.235 --> 00:35:08.595
I mean there was a boom in lithium in Australia last year.
371
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This year it's probably gold.
372
00:35:10.376 --> 00:35:18.957
So I think the beauty for Australia is that whatever commodity gets sanctioned or spikes, Australia will move quickly in that area.
373
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So I think...
374
00:35:21.498 --> 00:35:23.500
I think the outlook's pretty good for Australia.
375
00:35:23.540 --> 00:35:27.944
We're in the mineral securities partnership with the UK and the US.
376
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Let's hope we can do a bit of friendshoring with Donald Trump.
377
00:35:31.807 --> 00:35:35.050
I'm hoping to go to Washington next year to see what the US can do.
378
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There is money coming from the US.
379
00:35:36.751 --> 00:35:39.894
So I think Australia is a secure, friendly country.
380
00:35:40.114 --> 00:36:03.020
western nation is going to play a really important part because you can go to africa as much as you want but if you're not in that libido corridor that they've got in all those safe countries then um you know good luck i mean good luck trying to go to western africa at the moment some part so i think australia is going to be really a focus for the major so find something and they will come and buy you out which is what's happening
381
00:36:04.323 --> 00:36:09.231
Well, thank you, John, Naomi and Richard for your valuable insights.
382
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It's been so wonderful to hear from you all.
383
00:36:12.235 --> 00:36:20.428
And I encourage the audience to reach out or, you know, come and say hello after this chat or reach out via LinkedIn or the, you know, the websites.
384
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And I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference.
385
00:36:24.595 --> 00:36:25.196
Thanks, everybody.
386
00:36:25.216 --> 00:36:25.616
Thanks, Danica.
387
00:36:25.636 --> 00:36:25.977
Thank you.
388
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Thanks, everyone.
389
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Thanks, Danica.
