Happy new year Intelligent Miners! Welcome back to the newsletter.
To kick off 2025, we’re talking about future-ready finance and investment. Why? Because that’s where the mining story starts and ends. And also, for those of us who are based in London, UK, December is the month when the Resourcing Tomorrow event (or Mines & Money for those of us who are old school) comes to town.
The UK is home to Europe’s largest stock market – the London Stock Exchange (LSE). To give you an idea of scale, more equity was raised in London during 2024 than the next three European exchanges combined. For the mining industry, London is one of three key finance hubs, alongside Sydney, Australia (home to the ASX) and Toronto, Canada (home to the TSX). It hosts some of the world’s largest mining funds and also the London Metal Exchange (LME) which bills itself as “the world centre for industrial metals trading”.
As an investment destination, London received a lot of negative attention from the financial press during 2024, but activity from initial public offerings (IPOs) is picking up buoyed by capital market reform (spurred by the Hill Report). Recent changes to listing rules for the LSE have meant that it’s now easier for companies (of all kinds) to list and undertake transactions.
Reinvigorating London as a mining finance hub was the topic of an interesting panel discussion at Resourcing Tomorrow during which, Ross Alistair, Tom Attenborough and Rowan Thorne raised the point that attracting finance is only part of the story. The UK shouldn’t just be working out how to garner more mining capital, but also how to channel more of it into UK-based mining companies and operations.
Despite being ranked as a ‘low risk’ jurisdiction for mining, very little of the capital raised on the LSE stays within the UK. This makes it incredibly challenging for UK mining companies to finance their operations, both new and existing; something that could prove a missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to delivering on the UK Critical Minerals Strategy. The UK is living proof that more money doesn’t always equal more mines, even when a country is relatively resource rich.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this – drop me an email. And enjoy this month’s editorial content. There are lots more thoughts coming your way over the next few weeks.
Carly
Mo’ money, mo’ mines?
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“Storytelling is the foundation upon which The Intelligent Miner community is built. We share knowledge, we educate, and we connect people through the power of storytelling”
Carly Leonida