A steady stream of unfunded yet highly prospective opportunities in the battery minerals space led Sir Mick Davis to form investment company Vision Blue Resources (VBR) earlier this year. After raising $60 million in the first few weeks, it has already made its first investment and more will soon follow, Davis told Fastmarkets.
The former chief executive of Xstrata Plc said in an interview that many battery minerals projects are ripe for investment but are not currently capable of being funded.
"There are projects that should have been looked at, but the majors have not had their eye on them or have not developed their potential [within majors] because they've been guided on where they should focus their energy, which is on returning cash to shareholders," he added.
According to Davis, the reason why
he formed VBR is the deal flow that was coming past his desk. He narrowed the projects down to two or three constructive opportunities; one of them was the Molo graphite mine in Madagascar, in which VBR has now invested $29.5 million through its Toronto, Canada-based owner NextSource Resources.
"I said, let's just put this together in a vehicle which has a proper coherency around it;...