Enco Advisor: Peter Schmitz, Metals and Mining Leader
Peter Schmitz is an Enco Insights resources advisor, specialising in metals and mining. He has spent more than two decades working with the world’s leading mining organisations. A former Head of Macro and Commodity Research at Anglo American, Peter has also spent time at BHP and Norilsk Nickel. Enco Insights spoke to Peter about his career and his outlook for the metals and mining sectors, and how they can achieve greater efficiency.
Enco Insights: You’ve had a varied career in resources research over two decades. Can you tell us more about the work you’ve done?
Peter Schmitz: I started my career literally at the coalface - in open cut and underground. I worked in platinum group metals and nickel, through BHP and Norilsk. I built up my experience over time from operations, through projects, business development and strategy divisions through to advising boards and the executive and presenting to investors.
At Anglo American I headed up the macro and commodity research division which helped the executive and board with company decisions by making sense of the outside.
Today I'm the managing director of SoluSynth, a boutique consultancy that helps people in, or related to, the resources sector on everything from macroeconomics and markets through to the various scenarios around that. I've been lucky in my career and it’s been a great deal of fun in an important sector.
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Enco: What are the key issues on the agenda of industry leaders in the resources sector?
Peter: There’s more demand for the materials that we produce. But we’re going to do this more efficiently. We’ve seen this already in things like LED lighting versus incandescent lighting; or vehicle panels, which have transformed from once being two millimetres thick through to less than one millimetre nowadays.
“At Anglo American I headed up the macro and commodity research division which helped the executive and board with company decisions by making sense of the outside. ”
The second issue is we are going to need a whole lot more of the materials that enable us to have this efficiency. These will be things like niobium, vanadium and lithium that help us in batteries. A lot of these things are found as byproducts and we're going to have to find a way to extract these more efficiently and value them accordingly, potentially from new sources, whether waste streams or new kinds of deposits.
The third issue gets us to a small, cramped world. There's going to be an increasing demand for fairness, and that will be a global issue. We sweep this into an ESG bucket at the moment, but it's really about everybody getting their fair share.
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Enco: What is your personal motivation for signing up to the Enco Insights advisor network?
Peter: My motivation for joining the Enco network is that it is a specialised network that looks at the resources sector. This means that clients can find you.
From my perspective, it also means that I'm associated with a group of people that feed into a sector that I'm passionate about. I'm sure that if there were a dinner party, we'd have lots of exciting discussions - at least it would be exciting from my perspective!
