BRIAN Menell, a member of the family that used to run one of South Africa’s largest mining and industrial groups, Anglovaal, wants to challenge China’s dominance in the supply of minerals used in battery manufacture including nickel, tin, tungsten, lithium and cobalt, said Bloomberg News.
“There’s something of a race to capture this industry,” he told Bloomberg in an interview at his London office. “We want to be as big as possible as soon as possible,” he said of TechMet, a company backed by high net worth investors. The company intends to raise $80m and then go on to invest $400m in three years.
If Menell’s proposal goes to plan, TechMet will go public offering shares worth $1bn in about five years’ time.
The company already has stakes in a tin and tungsten mine in Rwanda, a nickel project in Brazil, a US vanadium processing plant and a recycling facility in Canada that extracts cobalt and nickel from spent lithium batteries, said Bloomberg News.
Menell also said it wasn’t too late to start participating in the industry in which the Chinese have a healthy head start. “There has been a cooling off around some of the hype,” said Menell of a correction in certain minerals prices. “Prices still do not reflect how quickly these techs will evolve and how much metal is needed to fuel that growth,” he said.
