![]() Mark-Anthony has a vision for a future Africa as the breadbasket of the world.įor many years Mark-Anthony has been active on the ground in Africa through his charitable foundation, the Johnson Foundation. He has worldwide interests in mining, infrastructure, power, electricity, shipping, commodities, agriculture and fisheries and is currently looking to develop farms across Africa. With a deep-rooted connection to the African continent, Mark-Anthony has been passionate about developments in Africa for over 30 years. Mark-Anthony is also enthusiastic about the latest communication tools, which he uses intensively to keep in touch with up to the minute data. Mark-Anthony’s vision has long been towards emerging and frontier markets with particular emphasis on Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and his philosophy can be summed up in the phrase “knowledge is power”. He was educated in the UK at Mill Hill School and then achieved a BA (Hons) in Business and International Finance at University of Westminster. This followed the success of the JIC Group which he founded in 1985. MARK-ANTHONY JOHNSON is the founder and CEO of JIC Holdings, an innovative private holding company established in 2009 which he has built into an international asset and investment management company with offices, associates and investments around the globe. Big firms can tolerate low prices because cobalt is a by-product of the extraction of copper and nickel, both of which remain pricey. Yet Glencore, the world’s biggest, said on February 15th that it may keep output nearly unchanged this year, having cranked it up in 2022 China Moly, a rival, is about to open a new facility that may yield 30,000 tonnes a year (equivalent to 16% of the world’s output in 2022). The price has already fallen below many miners’ break-even points. In other markets, low prices would force producers to shut mines. ![]() The world could find itself swimming in cobalt. Most striking is a surge in Indonesian exports, which are projected to hit 18,000 tonnes this year, up from virtually none a few years ago. Susan Zou of Rystad Energy, a consultancy, forecasts that Congolese production will jump by 38% this year, to 180,000 tonnes. ![]() Also read: EU to invest €50 million in infrastructure and mining in DRCĪt the same time, supply is rising, and fast. Even a boom in electric vehicles has not been sufficient to counteract this, since manufacturers have done their best to reduce the use of the formerly super-expensive metal. ![]() It has since waned as people spend less time staring at their screens: as demand for consumer electronics fell, so did that for cobalt. The appetite for these, already strong in the 2010s, exploded during the covid-19 pandemic. Most cobalt goes into the battery packs which power smartphones, tablets, and laptops. The story is partly one of reduced demand. Fast forward to today and the price of the blue metal, which had more than doubled between summer 2021 and spring 2022, to $82,000 a tonne, has collapsed to $35,000, not far from historic lows. Not only was cobalt, a crucial battery material, being dug up far too slowly to meet soaring demand, but the lion’s share of known reserves sat in DRC. Just a year ago a global crunch in one metal looked likely to single-handedly derail the energy transition. In case you missed it: Cobalt, a crucial battery material, is suddenly superabundant
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