Mining Insights: global trends in critical metals

Mining is a hot sector again and share prices have surged, so we headed back to Cape Town and the largest mining investment event in Africa. In the first of a series of videos, we talked to experts about the big themes for mining investors in 2026 including the commodities supercycle, high metal prices, lithium, a perfect storm in one metal market and why miners in this region are ‘turbo charged’ right now.

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Anthony Viljoen, CEO, Andrada Mining: I hate saying ‘commodity supercycle’ because as soon as everybody starts talking ‘commodity supercycle’ it means that you’re at the top.

But look, I do think that there is a fundamental disconnect between the underlying supply of minerals and the demand that’s coming from multiple different sources.

I don’t want to say that ‘this time it’s different’, but I do think that this time it is different  because I think you’ve seen a decoupling of supply chains and I think that people are realising the long lead times that it takes to get projects into production and to get a product into market.

John Meyer, partner and mining analyst at SP Angel: Lithium was very low, it was overproduced, and this was always going to happen. We didn’t forecast the price was going to go down to $650 a tonne for spodumene and that’s the raw material that we really look at because this is what most of the miners are producing.

Then it went back all the way up to about $2,400. Now, not as high as it was when it went a bit crazy, but still a pretty strong price.

Ian Stalker, executive chair, Bradda Head Lithium: But now we’ve moved into a different scenario, where the most important thing that everyone’s looking for based on these huge AI integrated systems that are coming in, is power.

Now we can supply power, but you need to supply it consistently. And what you need for consistent power is battery back-up. So, a lot of lithium demand has probably moved from the vehicle side of things into these big storage batteries, and it’s that that’s kicking us off.

Plus the Chinese have probably got to stage where some of their mines are a little bit old. They’re certainly not economic, but perhaps under the Chinese style of management that’s less important than having a strategic supply, but nonetheless there are environmental challenges, etc, and they’ve taken some lithium off the marketplace, which means we have got the opportunity of supplying into that space that now exists.

Bernard Aylward, CEO, Kodal Minerals: Well, look, we see that the lithium price has risen around 270% over the last six months. It was pushed down to a low of below $700 a tonne, sitting today at around $2,000 a tonne, SC6 price. The main driver behind that is obviously the continued increase in demand for spodumene product and battery products, both vehicles as well as battery electric storage systems, integration into large grids, and more widespread take-up of the green energy production and storage.

I think the real recognition was that the supply had not increased in line with the increase in demand. China was shutting a few of their high-cost and petalite mines, which are much more difficult than, say, the spodumene and conversion of spodumene.

Emanuel Proenca, CEO, Savannah Resources: So, there will be those who respond to demand and those who ask for more supply. And the whole system will eventually start to stabilise maybe in 10 years’ time or something like that. Until then you will see volatility.

The volatility will be extreme at some points. You have seen in the last six months the price go from 600 to 2,500 in six months. It is impressive the speed at which the price has grown and recovered, and you will see that again in the future.

Charles Bray, chair, Aterian: Lithium’s back. I think the market again has normalised to a certain extent. And a lot of that had to do again with China, which dominates the processing of lithium. So, Chinese refinery, I think, accounts for in the high 80s per cent of the global refinery refining capability. So, because of that, they were able to stockpile or accumulate large lithium deposits and that impacted on the price.

What we saw in particular in Australia, a lot of the mines closed or reduced their production. And so now the price has stabilised, become much more normal. And I think the Chinese recognise it’s to their benefit to have a slightly higher price. So, I think what we’re going to see is a much more normal market.

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Robin Birchall, CEO, Serval Resources: Look, copper pricing, I had a thesis about copper maybe three or four years ago that it quite likes inflationary periods. I didn’t have a view on supply demand.

To be quite frank, until the middle of last year or towards the end of last year, most people were that it’s going to be in balance, it’ll be fine. Which is why it was gradually increasing in price and most people had price targets that were sub $10,000.

That has changed rapidly, but the inflation position hasn’t changed. It’s sort of connected with gold and gold going to $5,000. Copper will increase in price along with inflation because it’s an industrial metal that you can’t get away from. You absolutely have to have it for fundamental functioning of society. 

Rupert Verco, CEO, Cobra Resources: If you look at what the market dynamic is for copper, every light needs copper. Every bit of electrical equipment needs copper to transfer energy.

There is probably enough copper that if we could recycle it all, it might keep us in operation for the next dozen years, but I think there’s a statistic where we’ve mined over the last 500 years something like 700 million tonnes of copper

That’s obviously in every building, in every house, in every vehicle. We can’t recycle that.  We need to actually achieve net zero targets and to address GDP growth of 3%. We nearly need that same amount of copper again in the next 20 years, and the rate of discovery is slowing down in terms of finding new mineral deposits and existing mines are struggling to increase capacity. The big copper mines of the world, Grasberg, Escondida, they’re getting deep. They’re infrastructure constrained. They’re at massive capex costs to try and increase the output from these operations and their reserves are dwindling.

John Meyer: Trump started it all off. He said he’s going to put tariffs on copper and that is quite likely to happen. The US imports a lot of copper and Trump wants the US to make a lot more copper. Makes a lot of sense.

So, traders start, the arbitrage level grew in the States, traders brought a lot of copper into the US. That then created a little bit of a shortage elsewhere in the world. China at the same time was ramping up copper smelting capacity because they want to be sure they control more of the world’s copper.

But what we do know is that there is likely to be a shortage of physical copper later this year due to mine problems, due to the increase in demand. Again, we go back to AI data centres or just the general increase in electrification of our world, the wind farms, the solar farms. All this stuff has to be connected to grid systems, battery systems to then help balance those grids. We’re talking about big battery systems. And the more of this is put in place, the more copper is needed.

Robin Birchall: You can see pretty dramatic price movements, as we’ve seen. Like, I mean, it was about $14,000. It’s come back now to around about $13,000. But that is, I don’t want to call it thinly traded because it’s not, but it’s not a trillion-dollar market, you know? And when you see external capital flow from the non-mining sector, from the generalists, it can very quickly at the margin change prices rapidly. And that’s what we’ve seen.

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Anthony Viljoen: I’ve been a tin bull since 2008 when we first started looking at the metal. That was a real inflection point for the tin price in that the new uses for tin is not your tin cups and your tin roofs that was typically characterised by the uses back then. But it’s got a very key role to play in all your electronics, all your AI chips and semiconductors.

This tin bull market has been coming for the last 20 years because you’ve had very little new supply coming on stream because of a lack of exploration. But then as the world is electrifying and transitioning to a green transition, you’re seeing the uses of tin proliferate. So, you’ve got a perfect storm in the tin market that’s been brewing for some time now.

We’re sailing through it at the moment, which is fantastic. We hit all-time highs on the tin price.

Ron Heeks: It’s major use traditionally as a metal hardener, particularly in lead. So, every 12-volt lead acid battery has antimony to make the cell walls harder. And if you reduce the amount of antimony in it, then the warranty on the battery decreases because it just doesn’t last as long.

Every bit of military lead has antimony in it to make it harder. And that’s between 2% and 6% of every artillery shell, bullet or whatever, has antimony in it. 

The big growth one over the last few years, the last eight years, really, has been solar panels. So, the panel becomes 2% to 4% more efficient, and that’s quite big because solar panels are only 22% to 24% efficient anyway, so a couple more per cent is actually significant. There’s about 40 cents worth of antimony in a panel.

That’s the other interesting thing about antimony that for most of its uses, it’s a very, very small cost factor in the end product. There’s probably $3 worth in a lead acid battery and that’s worth a couple of hundred bucks. There’s a couple of bucks worth in a solar panel. It can handle quite high price fluctuations. We bought the project at $9,000 and it went to $60,000 a tonne.

Anthony Viljoen: Tungsten’s main application is probably in defence systems and bullets and things like that. I think that as you’re seeing now in the world the sort of splitting up of global supply chains, elements that were not really well recognised like tungsten and tin and what have you, are now starting to take on a critical importance.

The tungsten price has been the best performer out of everything, even gold, tin, everything. We’ve seen you talk about some deposits, you look at Guardian Metal Resources (LSE:GMET), they’ve had an amazing run. You look at Tungsten West (LSE:TUN) that’s gone gangbusters. This was an old tin and tungsten deposit that we’ve got and it’s probably higher grade than most of the other tungsten deposits out there.

Ivan Murphy, executive chair, Harena Rare Earths: I think that from a retail or institutional investor, whatever kind of investor, if you’ve been following the mining space, even if you’ve been in gold for 20 months, you’ve done three times your money, I don’t know whatever the number is.

We’ve seen some recycling happening out of gold into critical metals. The critical metal story is so different to that, it’s not driven by that same sentiment, and I think it’s going to be a longer cycle and a bigger cycle in critical minerals. That’s not just rare, it’s graphite and other elements too.

So, we think that that has really not gone anywhere near where it’s going to go. The US and other Western buyers of rare earths and critical minerals, they’re not price sensitive so much as they are supply sensitive. Can you deliver it? Can it work? And if so, we’ll help you. This is a brilliant strategy of President Trump where they’re making these investments in critical mineral projects, a couple in Africa already, a couple in Brazil, and it’s smart.

I think we could be doing that in the UK. I think the Europeans could be doing the same because then you’re inside the project and you’re helping and you’re contributing to moving it forward. And then, of course, you’re putting yourself in a good place for offtake and agreements on the actual product when it comes.

So, we’re sitting right there in that space. We think it’s just going to be a brilliant, brilliant space for investing for maybe the next five to six years, as much as that.

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John Meyer: Yeah, the African miners are turbocharged right now. They are very busy, particularly in Zambia, Botswana, Namibia, looking for new areas, looking for new deposits, and, actually, they’ve been starved of cash for about 15 years since the global financial crisis, when money went out of mining and went into technology stocks, in recent years, it went into AI and everybody said, look we can make more money in US tech, and so we didn’t have any cash for explorers, we didn’t have any cash to develop new mines.

Suddenly, everybody’s realised that this is important and we need to get on with it. So, when prices rise you get the guys coming out of the bush, shall we say, with new projects, so they’ve been busy beavering away with private capital finding things and trying to bring them to a point where we can recognise value.

So, we’ve seen a couple of potential new copper mines coming out of Zambia. We see new licence areas coming out of Namibia and Botswana. More people going into Zimbabwe, which seems to be quite reasonably settled, in fact.

Hearing more stories about informal Chinese miners being pushed out of other countries. Quite a lot of chat about logistics in Africa. The Americans have been building the Lobito Corridor from Angola into the DRC, and you’ve got the Chinese building another rail line from Dar es Salaam, again, through various other areas towards the DRC. So, the Chinese want metal to go from the Congo East out to China and the Americans are trying to get metal to go from the Congo West out to the United States.