Mining Analyst Interviews

Given it is an entry level new grad analyst position, they know you are not an industry expert and will not be asking you super detailed questions about the industry (e.g. heap leaching, drilling techniques, etc.). They probably want you to have some general knowledge about the sector and below are my thoughts on things you probably want to know in advance of an entry level mining IB interview:

• Why are you interested in the mining sector?
  • Mining is not really seen as a “sexy” industry to a lot of university students who would rather go into tech, consumer, etc. so I think having a good answer as to why you want to do mining banking is very important
• Understand the difference between the groupings of metals and what they are generally used for
  • The metals are typically grouped as follows: precious metals (i.e. gold, silver and platinum group metals), base metals (i.e. copper, nickel, zinc, etc.) and bulk metals/commodities (i.e. iron ore, coal, etc.)
  • Examples of what they are used for are gold is primarily used as an investment vehicle but also things like jewelry and certain electronics, whereas copper is used for things like wires, electronics and batteries
• Have a general idea of recent deal activity in the sector and being able to explain the rationale behind the transactions
  • For example, Rio Tinto announced in October 2024 that they would acquire Arcadium Lithium. Lithium is an energy transition metal (used in batteries) and those metals have been all the rage in the past couple of years, so Rio wanted to get more exposure to that
  • You can read press releases, news articles, analyst reports, etc. to understand the deal rationales but I think you should expect to be able to talk about a recent mining deal in an interview
  • I think somewhat related to this is being able to explain general industry trends, deal activity tends to follow these trends too where the current hot trend is everyone wants exposure to battery/energy transition metals like copper, lithium, etc. however these opportunities are hard to find
• Understanding the different types of companies in the mining sector
  • You touched upon it in your comment about explorers vs. juniors vs. seniors, but I would say you should know it can be segmented even further than that. I would categorize companies as producers (seniors vs. juniors), developers, exploration companies and then streaming/royalty companies
  • I made a comment here that explains the difference between these companies
• Understand the different mining valuation approaches that are used for the different types of mining companies
  • I made a comment here that explains the different mining valuation techniques and generally when they should be used (also touches on your NAV question)
• I do not think you need to know much about 43-101 regulations, other than that it was put in to make sure people were not making up reserve/resource numbers to scam people (if you’re interested, read about Bre-X to see why these regulations were put in but I highly doubt an interviewer would ask you about why 43-101 was put in)
• I do not think you need to know the details of heap leaching or the specifics of different drilling methods as that is probably too detailed. Bankers are not supposed to be experts in mining engineering/geology, so a lot of the time you will end up relying on the geologists/mining engineers work (i.e. preliminary economic assessment, pre-feasibility/feasibility study, etc.) to do the valuation of the mining asset where you may make some adjustments to it depending on a the facts/circumstances

This was a lot of info, but let me know if you have any other questions!