Let’s start with an introduction to Afrivolt and its main objectives.
Afrivolt is a South African company that’s looking to become the first homegrown gigafactory on the continent by localizing the production of lithium-ion battery cells for use in the stationary storage market. So, this is for residential, commercial, industrial, and utility-scale battery solutions.
The ways in which we can focus on the value-add for African economies is a key focus today at Mining Indaba. So, how can Africa move from an exporter of its reserves, to becoming a key player in the value chain?
I think this is the major topic of discussion, especially at this event. Africa holds more than 30% of global deposits of transition minerals. And in order for us to unlock that value, there needs to be beneficiation of local value addition. The problem arises, when you see that China is processing more than 95% of these critical minerals to battery grade.
So from an intellectual property perspective, there is this shortage of this on the African continent. In order to unlock the downstream value addition, you need to have strong international partnerships, to localize the processing of these minerals to battery grade.
Are you seeing any policy shifts to unlock that potential that you just spoke about? What is there still to be done in terms of the role of government in establishing policies on this?
There are a lot of policies out there, and I think this is one of the issues that people have, especially when looking at foreign direct investment. The lack of policy certainty is what has deterred foreign direct investment into the continent.
That being said, there are a lot of policy frameworks like the African Mining Vision, the African Green Mineral Strategy, as well as the individual country strategies, that filter into ensuring local value addition, as well as trying to attract foreign direct investment. I think what we need to do as a continent in general, is move from strategic documents into actual implementation.
In addition to your work at Afrivolt, you’re also launching a critical minerals and infrastructure fund. Could you tell us more about your initiative there?
One of the other businesses I’m involved in, as a shareholder and chairman, is a company called Cannon Asset Managers. And through this process of starting Afrivolt, which is very much on the downstream manufacturing side, we realized that there is a significant trough of investment that’s going into developing junior mining companies, to become larger players in the space. As well as in the processing of these minerals locally.
So, Cannon have decided to launch a private markets offering where we want to actually aggregate institutional money, and then invest in these brownfield opportunities, which in the long-term could become a vertically integrated solution for Afrivolt.
We’re here at Mining Indaba today. What brings you here, and what are you most excited for this week?
It’s a huge opportunity to connect with everyone in the industry. You have all the various actors from government to private sector, to investors. It’s just a great opportunity to touch base with the network, and then advance some of the conversations we’ve been having, in terms of implementation of our plans.
