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New power, the managing and directing of currents towards a goal, is needed by the Western mining industry, which is still functioning on a trailing old power business model.
This was highlighted at Tuesday's London Indaba, where a spotlight was shone on the urgent need of Western world mining companies to pay attention to the benefits that could emerge by working with far great cognisance to the far-reaching strides that have been taken by the Eastern world.
While miners are mining and manufacturers are making things with metals and minerals, China in particular is beneficiating in between in a way that brings very significant competitiveness.
A slide displayed by London Indaba chairperson and South African mining luminary Bernard Swanepoel showed China's nigh-overwhelming contribution the world's clean-technology supply chain, for example. (Also watch attached Creamer Media video.)
Over the past two decades, China has transformed the macro environment for the global mining industry, Swanepoel noted in introducing John Thornton, an early mover in recognising the seismic shift that has resulted in China advancing very rapidly into the middle ground of adding value indispensably to mined products.
Besides being Barrick Gold Corporation non-executive chairperson and a director and professor of global leadership at the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he has been seeking to develop deep partnerships, Thornton is also lead director of the Ford Motor Company, and the single most important reason for Ford being in China is to be able to see the future faster.
"In general, the Chinese companies are hungrier, more tolerant of failure, much faster and, most important, they are looking at the long-term success," Thornton outlined at the event covered online by Mining Weekly.
As the discussion between Swanepoel and Thornton was billed as a fire side chat, Thornton drew attention to the fire side chat that former Franklin Roosevelt gave to save America from catastrophe during the financial crisis of 1933.
One sensed from this that Thornton is alerting the world to the need to treat the inability of the West, including the mining industry, to match the strong forward momentum of China's advances as being a crisis that needed a Roosevelt approach to making this beneficial for the world as a whole by way of Western-Eastern partnership.
"I go for this long story because I think a theme that we're going to get to is the mining industry and mining companies and how they do or do not engage with the people as a whole," said Thornton, who also placed major emphasis on the need for personal trust between Western and Eastern leaders as well as between mining company leaders and African leaders.
"Personal trust is, in a sense, the whole thing. If you can't build the trust, you're not going to have any success, and it has to be genuine trust," he stated.
Swanepoel noted that China has done more than any other country to reduce the dependence on nickel and cobalt.
"You can agree or disagree with the need for that but it is China's moving away from high nickel and cobalt that has really moved the whole world's supply chains into a much better position, he said while displaying an infographic that illustrated the significant decline in the prices of batteries.
"This, if nothing else, is a clear megatrend and the cheaper batteries become, the higher their application should be throughout the world and certainly in battery electric vehicles, among other things.
Swanepoel: What lessons do you think Western-based mining companies could learn from the way China has expanded its global investment and organic capability in the natural resources industry?
Thornton: My passion for more than two decades has been the rise of China and the relationship of the rise of China to the world in general and the United States in particular. You can make a strong case that A...