North River Resources Plc (LON:NRRP) Chairman Rod Beddows caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss his new appointment as Chairman, what attracted him to NRRP, his background in the sector and North River’s future
Q1: Now Rod, you’ve just become the new Chairman of NRRP, what attracted you to the company?
A1: Well, a number of things really. I quite like challenging situations and you know North River has some interesting prospects but like all junior miners today, they’re facing hurdles and challenges but we will overcome them, that’s our intent. I like small companies even though I’ve worked as a consultant for financial advisers and in large companies, I like small environments. I like Zinc, I think it’s got a great future, it’s one of the metal commodities which is physically in short supply as opposed to probably everything else. I like the people involved because you’ve got to like the people you’re working with so there’s enough reasons there I think.
Q2: How do you see the Zinc market developing short and long term?
A2: I’m very good on long term forecasts so I’m quite happy to give long term forecasts, estimates, that sort of thing/scenarios. I wrote a book in 2014 which I self-published called Steel 2050 which looks at the ferrous sector way out to the second half of this century and of course that involves Zinc because roughly 50% of Zinc goes into steel galvanising. Short term, I think everything’s affected by short selling, it’s affected by, I think, a psychological condition in capital marketing and in funds which become extremely risk averse, everybody sees things going down and they’re not going to rest until they see them going up again which means they continue to disinvest because you can’t just hold your position forever. I think the short term cycle must be near bottom of course because of the fact that many large percentages of commodity producer at these price levels are underwater in terms of cash. I think by the second half of this year, things will look a lot more positive for most commodities, all the commodities I’m aware of, maybe not oil but certainly iron or zinc, maybe copper. The long term is extremely strong because the world is going to industrialise, population is still growing, people are moving into cities, they’re urbanising and industrialising and people want higher standards of living which requires large quantities of metal as we see in the development of China. So India is coming along behind and you’ve got still 2.5 to 3 million people who live close to poverty and wish to live like we live and they need metal, for the long term opportunities are vast.
Q3: Ok, so you touched on this a little, can you provide us with a little bit more on your background in the mining and metals sector?
A3: Yes, I’m probably a little bit unusual compared to most people who I talk to. I have no technical background, I’m not a metallurgist or engineer, I have no technical qualification in that sense. You can think of me as a business economist essentially, I’ve got a PhD from Harvard Business School and I became interested in, certainly initially, the steel sector in the first oil crisis way back in 1974. I’ve always operated as initially a Consultant then also as a Corporate Finance Advisor so I’ve always been in and out of advisory capacity and more recently, over a number of ventures, as a Director of those ventures/companies as well. So think of me essentially as an economist if you will in terms of technical background that I bring and I have become a specialist in metals and mining by practice rather than study, if you will.
Q4: Where would you like to see North River Resources Plc by this time next year?
A4: I think we’ve got a couple of big things to do, one of course is mining licence which is currently under negotiation and discussion and we should achieve a mining licence in the near future, I’m not going to put a timescale on it but certainly within the early part of this year, that’ll be a first major target. Then funding to complete our drilling programme which is underway to extend our resource reserve base and hopefully begin the construction of the mine so big things to achieve. I think once we’ve got the mining licence under our belt, everything else should flow, not easily because nothing is easy in this environment, but it should flow through this year.
