Coverage group Industrials/ Mining and Metals

Just a couple points about mining IB in general:

• Mining can be pretty broad where a lot of what I am saying below applies more to either base metals (i.e. copper, nickel, etc.) or precious metals (i.e. gold, silver, platinum group metals, etc.) but will generally apply to bulk metals too (i.e. iron ore, etc.)
• The general financial hubs for mining are in Canada (specifically Toronto or Vancouver), London, Australia and to some extent South Africa
• At least in the Americas, the majority of mining IB groups that have a strong reputation/deal flow tend to be the Canadian banks have dedicated mining teams who are mostly based out of Toronto/Vancouver
  • BMO metals and mining is seen as one of the top mining groups, but I think most of the other big 5 Canadian banks (e.g. RBC, Scotia, CIBC and TD) probably have good mining teams as well as others like NBF or Canaccord which are all based out of Toronto. I think some US banks have their mining teams in Canada as well (e.g. I think JP Morgan has a group in Canada)
  • I am not as familiar with the rest of the US banks, but I am pretty sure the rest of the US banks either have their mining group in the natural resources group (e.g. Goldman has mining under NR in NYC) or lumped in with the industrials group (I presume the banks with mining under industrial have more sparse/random deal flow in the mining sector)
    • I have seen the typical big players pop up as financial advisors in mining deals (e.g. GS, JPM, MS, BofA, Citi, etc.) but other than what I have listed above, not sure if the teams are US based, etc.
    • I did notice a lot of US banks advising on lithium related deals, but not sure how consistent that work is
• Assuming you are US based and want to work in banking in the US, I would say the US mining IB opportunities are a lot more limited vs. the other geos listed above (e.g. Canada, London, Australia, etc.)
  • If you want to stay in the US, I would say you should try to find US bankers in mining groups to network with to find out if they take interns/how they got to where they are. I am not very familiar with the US IB internship process, so I do not know if it is just as simple as getting a GS IBD internship and saying I want to work in the natural resources group to get the placement
  • I guess a question for you is if you would be willing to move to a different country for a better shot at working in mining IB?
    • I am not saying you have to do this to do mining IB, but there are a lot more opportunities outside the US
    • I do not know what the visa situation would be like in any of those geos, but assuming that's not an issue, I do not know how easy/tough it is for someone from the US to get a banking internship in Canada/London/Australia (e.g. you have the Harvard/Wharton undergrad which is respected, but a lot of the banks do OCR at local schools so probably need to network extensively, etc.) where typically you have people trying to move from Canada/London/Australia to the US and not the other way around
    • Additionally if you care about compensation, I am pretty sure you would be paid the best in the US
• An additional overall factor going with you, is your interest in the sector as most people coming out of school who want to do IBD, do not typically want to work in mining (i.e. rather work in M&A, tech, consumer, etc.). Also mining IB is pretty technical so I think a lot of the time the mining team will do both financing and M&A work if you care about that kind of stuff

Another question for you, what specifically are you doing as an intern at a mining startup in Africa? Are you working for an exploration company/developer in Africa?