Menell’s plan to challenge the Chinese

South African mining veteran Brian Menell wants to build a battery material giant to help challenge China’s domination of the nascent industry.

It’s still early days for his privately funded company, TechMet, which controls just a handful of assets from Canada to Rwanda. But he is raising more money and sees countries such as the US and Japan as potential partners to help catch China in the rapidly growing industry to provide battery grade supplies of everything from tin and tungsten to nickel and cobalt.

“There’s a degree of urgency now,” said Menell, who started his mining career with diamond giant De Beers in the ’80s and whose family built one of South Africa’s largest mining companies the Anglovaal Group.

“It’s a massive problem” that China has dominated supply of these materials for about 15 years, he said.

TechMet already has stakes in a tin and tungsten mine in Rwanda, a nickel project in Brazil, a US vanadium processing plant and a recycling facility in Canada that extracts cobalt and nickel from spent lithium batteries.

His company will start another round of fundraising in the next month and is looking to raise about $80 million (R1.2 billion). After that, Menell says he plans to further invest as much as $400 million in three years, with an end goal of selling shares in a $1 billion initial public offering in five years’ time.

“There’s something of a race to capture this industry,” he said. “We want to be as big as possible as soon as possible.”

Battery materials such as lithium, cobalt and nickel have been one of the mining industry’s bright spots in the last few years. Still, in recent months prices have retreated amid mounting concerns that miners are producing more cobalt and lithium than the market needs. But Menell isn’t too concerned about the latest price declines.

“There has been a cooling off around some of the hype,” said Menell, who after De Beers joined the Anglovaal Group, his family’s storied mining giant that was taken over by African Rainbow Minerals Limited.

“Prices still do not reflect how quickly these techs will evolve and how much metal is needed to fuel that growth.”–