THE METALS RUSH

among the companies that lined up to bid for Atlantic Nickel, a company that owns the Santa Rita mine in Brazil’s Bahia state, were two car-making firms. Not normally in the mix when it comes to direct, large-scale mining sector merger and acquisition (M&A) activity, their presence speaks volumes about metals scarcity, especially in a world of strangled supply chains.

As it turned out, South Africa’s Sibanye-Stillwater placed the winning bid for Atlantic Nickel. It offered $1bn in cash to Appian Advisory Capital, a UK-based private equity fund that had picked up Atlantic Nickel and another – Mineração Vale Verde (MVV) – out of bankruptcy in 2018. MVV owns the Serrote copper project, also situated in Brazil, which Appian Advisory redeveloped, and will become Sibanye-Stillwater’s first dedicated copper-producing asset.

For Sibanye-Stillwater, buying Santa Rita and Serrote was the company’s fourth major transaction this year in a high-risk, $2bn augmentation of its growth strategy. Previously centred on the production of gold and platinum group metals (PGMs), the group’s CEO, Neal Froneman, estimates that a third of future earnings will come from battery metals – a broad church that includes lithium as well as copper and nickel, which also have established industrial markets.

Taken as a whole, these metals are critical in building the batteries to power electric cars as well as renewable power storage applications that may play a role in baseload power supply. Other metals, such as PGMs, will also play a part in the green hydrogen revolution. Electric vehicles (EVs) and hydrogen technology are technological innovations