Can you share a bit about your background in mining and investment with our readers?
I am a portfolio manager and fund manager of Giantfuse Capital Partners, mainly focusing on metals and mining. Recently we have been delving more into renewable energy. I’ve been in the industry for more than eight years, focusing mostly on metals, including manganese, copper, lithium, and graphite investments across the spectrum of our portfolio in Sub-Saharan Africa.
You just touched on it briefly, but let’s look at financing flows. Where are you seeing investment flowing in the industry today?
Look, 2024 was filled with a lot of geopolitical issues and we saw a lot of parties suffering from that. But as Giantfuse, we see investment, especially in the metals and mining industry, going into your rare metals such as your copper, lithium, manganese, and gold. I see gold, as well, being the superstar in everything that they’re doing. Especially now when we see the amount of Chinese investments going through and buying a lot of gold bars and buying a lot of gold deposits. So for me, in that area, we are focusing mainly on these critical metals, because we cannot drive an EV without all the metals coming from these mining companies. With the metals mining, this means we get EVs and renewable energy. They sort of go in collaboration with each other.
How do you assess what makes a good investment in both coal and renewables?
Mining companies must have or must abide to ESG policies. ESG is what we actually look at. That’s the first thing. Because in our integrated investment, we always look at how the investors are going to impact the communities around us and how is it going to impact the environment that we’re living in. So, the first thing that we go for is our ESG policy, as part of our due diligence process. This is broken into five pillars which is ESG-integrated, proxy voting, and all that that comes with the evaluation of the company and the project and how it goes.
How do you monitor ESG standards? Do you have your own frameworks that you use?
We do have our own frameworks, but the thing that we actually delve on as a firm is collaborations. Collaborations with consulting firms is very key. So, we have our own system, tools, and frameworks that we actually apply and they’re uploaded on our socials. And in every investment that we go in to, we implement those policies and those frameworks. We cannot go into investment without studying the ESG, whether the company abides to that or not.
Let’s look at how the landscape is evolving with the energy transition. How are your investment strategies changing as the transition gains pace, globally and as well in Africa?
That one is a headache for our investment team, but that’s one thing that we always look for. Our strategy is mainly around the energy transition. We look at the policies, and our strategies are aligned with the governmental policies of the investment or the country where we want to invest into, because we cannot invest without knowing the policies of that country.
Making sure that the policies aligned with each other is important so that we can actually have a nice and low risk investment in that community or in that environment. So that’s what we’re looking at.
The second factor is evaluation. We look at the evaluation from 10 to 20 years on the project from inception. We study the project from inception using our ESG policies and framework. Studying the inception of the company, we look at whether they abide to certain laws? Did they follow certain policies? Are they giving back to the community that they’re working at or are they just working and mining and doing whatever they want? But, with the renewable energy and the energy transition, where it’s going, I think that if we can remove the geopolitical factors, we can have a very good world where companies, private sector, and public sector manage to work together.
We’re at Mining Indaba. What are some of the conversations that you hope to be having whilst you’re here? What’s been exciting so far?
I would say intergovernmental summit. That’s one area that I was actually spending my time in, because I wanted to find out about the ministries and what they’re saying. We see what is happening in Congo, and Congo is one of the big copper producers, and that supply-demand deficit is actually affecting the market. And the other thing is I’m here for the superstars of the mining companies. Everyone is here for the superstars. We want to see what discoveries they’ve made, what exploration are they busy with. And then, lastly, it’s I would say consultative firms. I enjoy working with consultative firms because they assist us a lot as investors to see the future in mining.
