GMS: Miners need to better connect with non-traditional investors, industry leaders say  

Mining companies need to find ways to make owning a lithium or nickel stock ‘cool’ or ‘sexy’ to create more value for an industry that’s struggling to produce enough critical minerals to meet the rising demand for green products like electric vehicles, industry experts said at The Northern Miner’s quarterly Global Mining Symposium in late May.   

People are interested in electric vehicles and the new technology hitting the road but aren’t aware of how “critical” a role the mining industry plays in producing the metals and minerals for those products, mining leaders on the “Turning Tesla investors into mining investors” panel said.  

“We do a great job of talking to each other inside the industry and [there’s] a little bit of an echo chamber — we all know how important this is,” said Emily King, founder of Prospector Portal, a search engine that provides data on the mining industry. “But how we communicate outside of our industry can sometimes be really overwhelming, filled with jargon,” she said.  

Nearly all crucial battery metals will witness supply deficits in the next decade as mining projects struggle to come online, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence analysts. The raw material disconnect is already impacting the end user as manufacturers announce cost increases, the research group recently said.  

According to Martine Turenne, CEO of FPX Nickel (TSXV: FPX; OTC: FPOCF), mining companies ‘underspend’ on public outreach and advertising. He urged larger companies that have the budget — as opposed to junior miners — to invest more in this field.  

Turenne said that he often compares the current critical minerals scenario to the California gold rush of the 1850s in order to explain the situation to potential investors who don’t have much knowledge in field of mining.  

“The people who really made money in the gold rush were not the prospectors but the individuals who were smart enough to sell the picks and shovels to those people who had ambitions of finding gold in California,” Turenne said. “We’re really in the picks and shovels business in that analogy. We are providing the underlying tools that are going to be used.”  

Nolan Peterson, CEO of World Copper (TSXV: WCU; US-OTC: WCUFF), said that the general public take raw resources for granted since they aren’t “buying it on a store shelf or seeing the price go up in their hands. 

“They see it through the different products, and they think, ‘Oh! The car companies are making a boatload of money,’ but they’re not seeing the critical minerals that are feeding into that,” he said, adding that most people think one can just ‘flip’ on a switch to increase the supply of raw materials.  

With many investors pouring their money into start-ups, Peterson doesn’t see why people can’t be encouraged to invest in junior mining companies. “Investing in a tech company that’s not going to be generating profits and going to be doing raises for five or ten years before profitability… that’s kind of what we’ve been doing for the last 30 to 40 years,” he said.  

Belinda Labatte, CEO of Lomiko Metals (TSXV: LMR; US-OTC: LMRMF) echoed a similar sentiment and said that while people get excited about a Tesla, they aren’t aware of the more than 30 critical minerals that exist in such products to make them function.  

Labatte urged the industry to bring “non-technical” people into the critical minerals business and change the vernacular around critical minerals as a source for new energy as opposed to mining.  

“The more we can tell the story around that… the more that resonates people that there’s a purpose to mining the product,” she said, “and that purpose is a climate success story.”