In the continued catch-up on September's Strictly Boardroom articles on MiningNewsPremium.net with Allan Trench, last week's article (12th Sept) was about Western Australian iron ore major Fortescue Metals Group (FMG), pizzas and electric car maker Tesla ("FMG makes good pizzas"). The obscure trifecta is linked by a corporate strategy example. The example focuses on an anonymous mid-tier pizza chain locked… Read this post →
In September it was my great pleasure to give one of the plenary presentations for China Metals Week in Beijing, organised by Metal Pages. My presentation aim was to draw together the themes of the conference, which were the electronic metals, battery metals, light alloys and antimony. The presentation was entitled: "An Economic History of the Esoteric Metals Markets: Batteries, Electronics, Light Alloys,… Read this post →
In a recent in depth article we discussed “What’s hot, what’s not and why” in the commodities world, based on a presentation by CRU Group at the ITRI International Tin Conference last month. Looking at the medium term prospects for a number of commodities, the article concluded that for a commodity to be “hot” with strong positive price fundamentals it… Read this post →
At the recent ITRI International Tin Conference, metals and mining consultancy CRU Group presented an update of its "Commodity Price Climate Change" forecast. This has nothing to do with which commodities would benefit from an anthropogenically warmed planet (we'll cover that another day), but is a way of summarising their views of whether commodity price outlooks will be “hot”, “warm”,… Read this post →
London's mining scene gathered in force at the Mining Journal's Gold Day. However, we left with concerns about the extent to which gold prices are being supported by investors, and about increasing political risk for gold miners, which is reducing some miners' leverage to the booming gold price. Investor-supported gold Just how much the current high gold price has been… Read this post →