Return of the IPO market good news for miners
But a wave of new explorers and producers are about to hit the bourse
Delta Lithium's gold spinout Ballard Mining and Telfer owner Greatland Gold among the high profile names
While markets have been volatile in the past few months, a positive sign for the mining market is a pick-up in initial public offerings.
Lion Selection Group (ASX:LSX) managing director Hedley Widdup recently pointed out that IPOs were one of the best barometers of the mining cycle because they reliably tracked liquidity.
'When liquidity is poor, it is very hard to achieve an IPO of an exploration company, and likewise when liquidity is freely flowing, investors gobble these up,' he said in Lion's recent quarterly report.
In the peak of the market, in 2021, there were 105 mining IPOs. That fell to 64 in 2022, 25 in 2023 and 15 in 2024.
There have technically been none yet this year.
Canada's Marimaca Copper dual listed on the ASX earlier this year but as it did not raise funds, not a single share has traded in the two months since its debut.
Southern Cross Gold Consolidated re-listed on the ASX with a new code after merging with Canada's Mawson Gold.
'In 2025 so far, there have been zero IPOs of resources companies that raised new money to achieve a brand-new listing, which is a litmus test that shows liquidity conditions generally remain subdued,' Widdup said.
Test starts today
Today, the ASX will welcome its first proper resources IPO this year when Robex Resources debuts.
Robex is based in Perth but listed in Toronto and managing director Matt Wilcox recently said poor liquidity on the TSX was behind the move to Australia.
The Jim Askew-chaired company, which operates a small mine in Mali and is developing the larger Kiniero mine in Guinea, raised $120 million in its IPO.
Meanwhile, new Telfer owner, London-listed Greatland Gold, is pushing ahead with its ASX cross listing which is expected to raise $50 million.
Robert Friedland's Ivanhoe Atlantic, developer of the Nimba iron ore project in Guinea, is expected to launch an Australian IPO shortly.
CEO Bronwyn Barnes, who also chairs ASX-listed explorer Indiana Resources (ASX:IDA), said Australia was the right place to list Ivanhoe.
'When you're talking about the market that understands iron ore, Australia is a perfect market for this company and for this product, and it also has a very strong familiarity of African projects,' she told the recent AFR Mining Summit.
'But a little bit more broadly than that, at Ivanhoe Atlantic, we've got a bit of a bigger vision about what we'd like to do, not only with the Nimba project, but other projects that we're interested in acquiring.
'And I think being present on the ASX platform gives us opportunities to either acquire or partner with other existing assets or companies on the development of other assets.'
AIM-listed Ariana Resources and Toronto-listed Orezone Gold are also progressing Australian dual listings.
Right time for Delta
Last month, Delta Lithium (ASX:DLI) announced it would spin out its Mt Ida gold project in Western Australia's Goldfields into new company Ballard Mining.
Mt Ida has a resource of 10.3 million tonnes at 3.33 grams per tonne gold for 1.1 million ounces of gold.
Delta managing director James Croser told Stockhead the company had focused on getting the Mt Ida gold project to a point where it could support a listing, which would allow Delta to countercyclically focus on its lithium projects.
'The gold market timing has lined up nicely as well, and it just seems like the best time for us to set it free,' he said.
On Friday, Ballard lodged a prospectus for a $25-30 million IPO, led by Bell Potter Securities and Argonaut.
'The quantum of the raise was a much-discussed number,' Croser said.
'We felt we probably could have got some more, and the market would have delivered on that … the valuation we've put on those 1.1 million ounces that exist there, they're really compelling metrics, and the market will see that, and it has seen that, and a lot of the feedback we've got is that it is extremely well priced.
'That was by design, because you've got to leave something on the table for the new money to enjoy an uplift and you really want to establish that momentum early on in the life of a listing, and we think it's going to run pretty hard and be very successful, and I can't wait to see it happen.'
Delta will retain a 46-49% stake in Ballard, depending on the final amount raised.
Croser will sit on the board, which also features former De Grey Mining chairman Simon Lill, while Delta chief development officer Paul Brennan will resign to become managing director of Ballard.
Former Ramelius Resources (ASX:RMS) and Wildcat Resources (ASX:WC8) chief financial officer Tim Manners will be Ballard's finance director, while Gold Fields' former Australian boss Stuart Mathews will be a non-executive director.
Juniors awakening
Ballard, which is aiming to hit the board in mid-July, isn't the only explorer on the way to the ASX.
Bauxite developer VBX is scheduled to list on the ASX next week after launching a $10 million IPO last month.
The company is planning to use the funds to complete a definitive feasibility study on its Wuudagu bauxite project in WA's Kimberley region, which has a resource of 95.9Mt and a reserve of 59.3Mt.
VBX also holds the earlier stage Takapinga bauxite project in the Northern Territory.
Last week, LinQ Minerals lodged a prospectus for an IPO to raise $7.5-10 million.
LinQ is chaired by Clive Donner, a former investment banker and founder of mining private equity fund LinQ Group.
The company owns the Gilmore copper-gold project, south of Evolution Mining's Cowal mine in New South Wales.
Gilmore has a resource of 1.2 million ounces of gold and 120,000 tonnes of copper.
LinQ is aiming to close the IPO on June 20 and list on July 4.
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The Australian
38 minutes ago
- The Australian
Zeekr announces $57,900 Model Y rival, plans charging network rollout
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ABC News
2 hours ago
- ABC News
Why won't Musk let Tesla EVs power homes?
Sam Hawley: It's an idea Elon Musk hasn't fully embraced just yet, and he doesn't want Teslas used for it. Some electric vehicles are already being plugged in to provide power to homes and even to the grid. Today, energy reporter, Dan Mercer, on the revolutionary technology and why the world's richest man is wary of it. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. Dan, this idea that electric cars could power our homes is fascinating, really. So I just want you to explain this for us. And to do that, it's good to talk about a guy called Richard Chapman. He is a petrol head, or we call them rev heads, I think. Dan Mercer: Yeah, indeed. He's an English fella, Sam, and he lives in the port city of Fremantle in Perth in Western Australia. Richard Chapman, car enthusiast: Absolutely adored cars ever since I knew what a car was. Dan Mercer: He says he's always loved his muscle cars, but he's also not the discriminating sort. He loves electric vehicles too. Sam Hawley: Yeah, he's the sort of, in my head, he's the sort of person you don't associate with an electric car. Dan Mercer: No, but you know, it's kind of funny. He loves Top Gear, he loves the smell of petrol, he loves a car that makes a lot of noise. He equally loves these things, which are sort of the polar opposite of cars. The opposite of that in many ways. Richard Chapman, car enthusiast: I never thought I'd quite embrace the EV thing so fully, but for me now, and I've still got a three litre V6 sports car but I look at that as like a horse. Like it's expensive, it's loud, it's very inefficient. It actually doesn't go as quick as the EVs, but that's more about sort of the emotion and real passion of something like a horse. Dan Mercer: There's this popular conception that tends to have these two things in completely separate camps. But Richard really does swear by his EVs. He reckons they're just phenomenal to drive and the technology behind them is mind blowing. Yeah, the measure of it in his case is that he has three EVs, Sam. Sam Hawley: It sounds like a lot. All right, and he is, Dan, really well set up for charging all of these EVs that he has. Dan Mercer: He is. He's one of these guys who just loves getting things to work really well, taking them apart and building them back together again so he understands them intimately. So in his instance, he's got a lot of solar on his roof. He's got batteries in his house and he's got tariffs that are really cheap in the middle of the day when there's heaps of renewable energy sloshing around the grid. What he does is he tries to charge the cars during those daylight hours. That way the energy that's powering the cars is dirt cheap. Either it's coming straight from his solar panels or it's coming from the grid during a time when prices are at their lowest. And for the most part, it seems to work. Sam Hawley: Yeah, okay. So he also likes to have his cars basically fully charged most of the time. And while they're just sitting there at night and not being used, he would actually like to use some of their power, right? But not for driving around. Dan Mercer: Not for driving, no. He's got a couple of batteries fixed to the wall of his garage as flagged. He can get by most of the time fairly cheaply. There are occasions though when his solar and those batteries aren't enough. And that tends to be in winter and the shoulder seasons when there might not be that much sun around but his demand for power might be quite high. And there are times too in summer when he reckons he just needs that much power because it's so hot and he has to run the air conditioning around the clock and the batteries aren't enough. At those times, he currently has to buy the power from the grid in the evening when prices unfortunately cost a fortune. Needless to say, that's something he's pretty keen to avoid. And he says the answer to those problems should be right there in front of him in the form of the energy that's stored in his EV's batteries. Richard Chapman, car enthusiast: When the main house batteries have run out, I wanna then be able to draw off of the electric vehicles that I've got hundreds of kilowatt hours sitting there and I wanna be able to use that back again. Sam Hawley: Wow, yeah. So using the car's batteries to power his home. And the EV batteries, they're massive, aren't they? So that is a possibility, isn't it? Dan Mercer: They are huge batteries, yeah. I mean, an average household battery is probably around 10 kilowatt hours of storage. A big EV battery can be 80 kilowatt hours or more. And as Richard notes, if you've got a car with a battery with that much power, even thereabouts, that's enough to run a typical household for days at a time. Richard Chapman, car enthusiast: You could run your house for, God, completely off grid for probably a fortnight on that. Sam Hawley: Wow, okay. So it sounds like a great idea. Why doesn't he just do it? Dan Mercer: Basically because his carmaker won't let him. There are other reasons, but the biggest one is that his carmaker won't let him. Richard has a couple of Teslas and Tesla just doesn't, at this stage in Australia at least, support customers using their cars to run their homes. It's not the only business that's going on. There's a big EV brand that's cool on the idea, but it's arguably the biggest name. Richard told me, there are ways he can hook his car slash cars up to his house. The problem is those ways aren't legally kosher. So if you do it, you void the warranty on your car. And if your EV costs $100,000, say, you're just not gonna do it. Sam Hawley: So why, just explain further then, Dan, why it is that Tesla doesn't want it to happen. Dan Mercer: Yeah, look, to be fair to Tesla, there are legitimate reasons why the company might be reticent. For starters, it's a fledgling technology we're talking about. It seems to lack a broadly accepted industry standard. Then there's just the physical reality of it. If you're discharging and charging your EV battery a whole lot more than you would normally do, a lot more because you're using it as a quasi household system, then that has an effect on the longevity of the battery. Most batteries, including the ones typically used in EVs, degrade over time as they're used more and more. And so Tesla doesn't want to be held liable for a warranty if the battery is being cycled in a way that wasn't envisaged, that wasn't tested, that wasn't guaranteed by their own standards. There are suspicions though that maybe Tesla has ulterior motives. The company famously sells household batteries and consumers are much less likely to buy those household batteries if their car battery can do the same thing. The thing is, Sam, this argy-bargy has big implications because some people reckon the technology in question could change the energy system completely. It has a few different names, including bidirectional charging, two-way charging, reverse charging, vehicle to grid and others. Ultimately though, it boils down to a simple proposition, not only charging EVs so they can be driven around, but discharging them too. Sam Hawley: All right, well then let's now, Dan, step through how this actually works because there are three main ways of using a car's battery for power, for powering a home, for instance. So let's run through those. Dan Mercer: Yeah, indeed. Well, and apologies for this next bit because it's all quite jargony. Sam Hawley: All right, we've been warned. Go forth. Dan Mercer: The first is what's called vehicle to load or V2L. And that's simply using your car to run things like tools from a power outlet in the car. At a high level, there's so-called vehicle to home or V2H, which is where you use the battery in your EV to run your house. That's what Richard wants to do. And there's evidence some people are already doing it in Australia, for example, during blackouts. And then there's the biggest one of all, which is called vehicle to grid. As the name suggests, it involves selling electricity from your car's battery to the grid at times when it's needed. A flip side to that is not only just selling it, but you can also store electricity in the car's battery, take it from the grid when there's too much supply, which of course is a problem that we're dealing with these days with so much solar around. Vehicle to home and vehicle to grid, especially are not straightforward. And there's a mix of hardware, software and regulatory permissions that are required to turn the energy that's stored in the car battery into something that can be put into the grid and used safely. So there's a whole bunch of technical challenges involved. Sam Hawley: But if you could transfer the power from your EV to the grid, you could make money from that, right? Dan Mercer: You could. How much? There's a big question mark. Presumably there'd need to be strong financial incentives for you to wanna do it. But ultimately this is kind of about trying to entice you to provide energy from your EV to the system when the system needs it. You might reasonably wonder what possible difference a few EVs could make to something as big as the grid, right? But eventually there will be millions of EVs on our roads and collectively they'll represent an enormous amount of storage that sits idle most of the time. Being able to tap into that in an efficient way could drastically reduce our need to generate electricity from sources like coal and like gas. Sam Hawley: Okay, and there are some people that think this could be revolutionary. Dan Mercer: In theory, yes. I spoke to Ross De Rango who used to run energy and infrastructure at the Electric Vehicle Council, which is an industry body. He now works as a consultant and Ross says there's, in his words, a big golden pot at the end of the rainbow if Australia can make bidirectional charging work. Ross De Rango, EV industry consultant: So the opportunity is the earlier closure of coal and gas-fired power stations. The opportunity is lower cost electricity for all consumers in the country. The risk of absence of support for this technology is that those benefits will take many more years to materialise. Sam Hawley: All right, well, Dan, this does all sound pretty amazing actually, but as you mentioned, there are car companies like Tesla that aren't playing ball at the moment. I think a few are, but there's a few roadblocks here. Dan Mercer: I'll be fascinated to see what happens with two-way charging, Sam. Ross De Rango, the ex-EV Council guy, says governments will need to take the reins and corral automakers in particular into a position of support for this. Ditto for the poles and wires companies that control the grid. Ross De Rango, EV industry consultant: So the automakers hold one set of keys, the energy networks hold the other set of keys. In order for vehicle to grid to occur, both of those parties need to put the key in the ignition and turn it on. Dan Mercer: We spoke to Federal Climate Change and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, for this story, and he's certainly keen to see it happen. He was very keen to stress that he would like to see car makers get on board. Chris Bowen, Energy minister: Well, I certainly encourage car manufacturers to get with the programme. Consumers will want this, and I think consumers will march with their feet. If every car in Australia was electric and people were using it to charge their house or their grid, that's equivalent to five snowy hydro schemes, for example. And it's great for consumers because, as I said, it puts consumers more in charge of their resources. The battery in your driveway will, on average, usually be about five times more powerful than the battery in your garage. Sam Hawley: So, Dan, how long do you think it will take before our cars are powering our homes? Dan Mercer: This is a classic example of an idea where there's a disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality. You know, I've been reporting on energy for a while now, and it always amazes me how often I hear people say bidirectional charging is going to solve so many of our problems, and it's a no-brainer, so it's just going to happen, wait and see. But that's a big assumption, and there are big assumptions right through energy and the transition we're going through right now. Of course, there are many seemingly great ideas that never come to fruition in energy and elsewhere because they get mugged by reality. If you listen to the likes of Ross De Rango and Chris Bowen, this is a revolution that's coming. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen. It's just a matter of when. Others aren't convinced. They're just not convinced. Apart from the vested interests of some of these car makers, it's hard to imagine electricity retailers, for example, jumping out of their skins at the idea. Why would they want to pave the way for anything that involves them selling less electricity to you? While those poles and wires companies, they move notoriously slowly. They're heavily regulated. They are heavily bureaucratic. One way or another, there is a tidal wave of new storage that's coming to Australia as battery prices fall and as we get deeper into this transition. And a lot of that is going to be in the cars we drive, for sure. If we can figure out a way of tapping into that fairly and efficiently, then, in theory, everybody wins. Just don't know if you should hold your breath waiting for it, though. Sam Hawley: Dan Mercer is the ABC's energy reporter. This episode was produced by Sydney Pead and Sam Dunn. Audio production by Cinnamon Nippard. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sam Hawley. Thanks for listening.
News.com.au
8 hours ago
- News.com.au
Relief in sight for homeowners as RBA poised for interest rate cut
The Reserve Bank of Australia is expected to announce its third cut in interest rates, after holding its rate in July despite the ongoing ease in inflation. According to a new Finder survey, 91 per cent of economists believe the RBA will cut the cash rate following its two-day meeting, which begins on Monday, with a 25 basis point cut bringing the cash rate down from 3.85 per cent to 3.60 per cent. The cash rate was held firm last month, with RBA governor Michele Bullock explaining the decision was about 'timing rather than direction', and was waiting on more data to confirm the decreasing inflation. At the end of July, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) published its quarterly inflation figures, which fell from 2.4 per cent to 2.1 per cent between March and June. Trimmed inflation, also known as underlying inflation, also dropped from 2.9 per cent to 2.7 per cent. Both headlining and underlying inflation rates are now within the RBA's 2-3 per cent target band, indicating inflation is low enough for the RBA to move forward. Mortgage holders are likely to be the biggest winners if the official cash rate is reduced on Tuesday. A homeowner with a $500,000 mortgage are set to save $2884 per year if the cash rate is passed on in full. Fnder head of consumer research Garahm Cooke said the RBA's failure to cut rates lash month was a disappointment for mortgage holders. 'If the RBA doesn't cut next week, they are risking an all-out attack on their legitimacy in the eyes of many homeowners,' he said. 'Last month's decision to hold shocked the market, and we are now seeing a 90 per cent plus certainty of a cut. With inflation well within the target range, there is no reason to hold. 'Banks will be under intense scrutiny to pass on a cut in full,' he said. Despite the overwhelming majority of economists predicting the fall in interest rates, University of Sydney's Stella Huangfu suggested the RBA should hold out for two reasons. 'First, June quarter trimmed mean annual CPI inflation is still 2.7 per cent, which is high within the 2–3 percentage target band and slightly above the RBA's forecast of 2.6 per cent,' she said.
