Sakhila Mirza, LBMA
Robin Lee, HelloGold
Everyone knows that the emerging market (and not just India and China) has an insatiable appetite for physical gold. But the latent demand is significantly greater than what has been seen to date. In our journey to date, potential partners from Asia to Africa and beyond have talked to HelloGold about how the right kind of digitised gold product, when marketed and delivered in the right way, can catalyse a whole new customer segment. This hypothesis has been reaffirmed in the market studies that we have conducted in our launch markets.
Daniel Litvin, Critical Resource
Increased stakeholder and investor pressures, as well as civil society scrutiny, critically impact decision-making and project development in the extractive industry. ‘Securing stakeholder outcomes: the seven habits of highly effective executives’ looks at examples of how good ‘habits’ can achieve positive political and stakeholder outcomes in the mining sector, and protect or enhance project value in uncertain, volatile or otherwise complex contexts.
Key takeaways:
- Good ‘habits’ or practices can help mining executives secure project and stakeholder outcomes, such as obtaining key permits and permissions, winning broad community support, protecting against regulatory, policy and tax shocks, and building trust with civil society.
- To secure key permits and permissions, mining companies should approach negotiations strategically, rather than transactionally.
- Mining executives can better protect themselves against regulatory, policy and tax shocks by engaging with broad and dynamic networks to avoid receiving just one set of perspectives and missing important developments.
- Social investment is more effective in securing community support if approached not as ‘how much should we pay?’ but as ‘what can we achieve?’.
- Partnerships with selected groups should be considered as powerful and cost-effective ways of leveraging expertise and capacity, winning stakeholder support and making reputational gains.
Ronald-Peter Stöferle, Incrementum Funds
The Tides They Are a-Changin’”: This slightly adjusted title of Bob Dylan’s famous song is a fitting opening to our summary of this year’s In Gold we Trust report.
Quantitative tightening, de-dollarization, and cryptocurrencies seem to be echoing the strains of R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”. Whether we find this changing of the tide good or bad is of no relevance to the phenomenon itself.
What is unfolding will affect our lives either way. But the better we brace ourselves for these fundamental changes, the more we will be able to benefit from them. The key findings may be summarized in terms of the following three changings of the tide:
- Change of tide in monetary policy: From QE to QT (and back again?)
- Change of tide in the global monetary order: De-Dollarization
- Change of tide in technology: Cryptocurrencies: Friends or foes of gold?
