Modern Mining January 2020

EVENTS

Barrick Gold’s Mark Bristow speaks at last year’s Mining Indaba. and Harry Greaves of Prospect Resources, the company that is developing the Arcadia lithium project near Harare in Zimbabwe. An intergovernmental summit will be held on 5 February and speakers confirmed are South Africa’s Minister Mantashe, Tyler Gillard of the OECD, Gesler E. Murray, Liberia’s Minister of Mines & Energy, Roger Baxter, CEO of the Minerals Council South Africa, Mohamed Abdel Vettah, Mauritania’s Minister of Petroleum Energy & Mines, and Lelenta Hawa Baba Ba, Mali’s Minister of Mines & Petroleum. The organisers of the Mining Indaba have made a determined attempt in recent years to take the event back to its roots by making it more welcoming to the junior miners who were the mainstays of early events. They say that they remain committed to connect- ing junior miners with capital. To this end, the Mining Indaba will again feature the Junior Mining Showcase, which is a dedicated exhi- bition space for junior and mid-tier mining companies, and also the Junior Mining Forum, a dedicated stage exploring the factors driving investment within the mining market. Also aimed at juniors is the Investment Battlefield, first launched in 2017 and highly popular ever since. The Battlefield provides a platform for junior mining companies with a market cap below US$50 million to pitch their projects to a panel of high-profile investors. Each pitch lasts no longer than five minutes with 20 minutes of feedback from the judges.

Winning the Investment Battlefield com- petition can have a marked impact on a company’s fortunes, as Thor Explorations and its CEO, Segun Lawson, can attest. Thor won the 2018 Investment Battlefield and just 14 months later secured a US$78 million financial package for its Segilola open-pit gold project in Nigeria, which is now ‘shovel ready’ with all approvals in place. It is projected to have a production of 80 000 ounces per annum and will rank as Nigeria’s first modern, large-scale gold mine. Commenting on the impact of winning the Investment Battlefield, Lawson says it was ground-breaking in terms of “getting out from under the radar” and increasing the company’s exposure. “It was the first time getting the story out to a more global investing audience. We had investors from Australia, North America, the UK and South Africa all there to listen.” According to the organisers, 900 plus min- ing executives, 250 plus executives from junior mining companies and 600 plus global inves- tors attended the show in 2019. In addition, over 200 organisations exhibited at the event. The Mining Indaba is organised by the UK-based, LSE-listed Hyve Group (previously ITE Group), which recorded revenues of £220,7 mil- lion in the year to 30 September 2019 and which describes itself as a “next generation global events business”. It acquired the Mining Indaba from Euromoney Institutional Investor in a deal worth £30 million announced in October 2018. Photos courtesy of Mining Indaba

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