First Impressions
Well today was my first time at the Mining Indaba and well it was a blast. The day begun slowly, there were some problems with the registration time and some people were not impressed. I was not impressed too as I woke up really early and I had to wait close to an hour to register. So it was not looking good at about 9am. The registration process when it begun was simple enough, so that was good. After registration the delegates had to wait until 1:15pm as that was the official start time for the Mining Indaba.

Let the Indaba beginAt this point I was really excited, I got my free conference swag (slang for free corporate gifts), I read the schedule and I was ready to start indaba-ring. Let me point out that I have a history in commodity trading and so I had a general understanding of the industry or so I thought. The conference schedule kicked off with a Commodity Outlook and Review series of speeches. The lead off speaker was Timothy Wood, Vice-President of International Investment Conference (the organising company for the Mining Indaba). Mr Wood gave a brief overview of the Mining Indaba. This was a great way to start as I didn’t know much about the Mining Indaba. Some quick facts about Indaba, last year there were about 5000 delegates, this year there will be about 4000 delegates, with a 25% decline in attendance. The layout of the venue has been improved with better peer-to-peer networking systems. The networking aspect of the Indaba is the most important aspect of the Indaba. I definitely noticed that at the welcome cocktail party, people were networking, I even got involved, I was a NETWORKER. SWEET!

With respect to exhibitors, the number of exhibitors for listed Mining houses is down and that is due to the current financial crisis and the recession. Mining companies have been hit hard by the economic downturn. What was somewhat surprising was that some African countries did not have exhibitor companies. This Indaba does help put the spotlight on African mining. I had expected African countries with resources to be well represented by the private sector. However, government delegations are strong and that is commendable.

All-in-all Mr Wood gave a good account of the Mining Indaba. So who was next? Well, Barclays Capital Director of Commodities Research Kevin Norrish was next and I really enjoyed his take on the commodity world. His topic was Resource Demand-Supply scenarios in a Global Financial Crisis. Off the bat, let me say you may or may not know this but the Global Financial Crisis is alive and well and everyone with a lot of money (or who had money) is crying about it. “Things are bad” was the quote of the day. So this was the basic theme of Mr Norrish’s presentation. He was equipped with a lot of graphs and charts which according to him showed that things are bad. So I was like man, THINGS ARE BAD! Mr Norrish mentioned that global growth was the slowest since World War II. Industrial metals lost 60% of their value in 4-5 months. He noted that commodity demand was very bad and the decline in commodity demand in China was significant to say the least. However there was a glimmer of hope. Some sectors had bottomed out and others were stabilizing. There is still demand for Cooper, Zinc and Aluminium in China due to their stimulus package, which is very focused on infrastructure. Quick note, China is a bigger player in the commodity universe than I could ever imagine. And it will continue to dominate as China still consumes a lot less commodities per capita compared to its western counterparts.

Mr Norrish ended his presentation by saying that we still live in a resource constrained environment. And I believe him; he gets paid to say that.

Final thoughts
The Mining Indaba hopefully will continue to be interesting. I think it is a great networking opportunity, more so it’s a great learning opportunity. I learnt a lot today, I heard some very clever guys speak and even Corporate Social Responsibility had a dedicated venue and from what I saw there is a lot of emphasis on this issues.Things are bad, really bad according to the miners.I hope tomorrow will be as fun as today.

By Simbarashe Mabasha

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