Those seeking to fund mining projects needed to look further afield when it came to attracting seed capital, according to well-known investment expert Rick Rule.
Speaking as part of a panel at the MiningNews Select conference in Perth, Mr Rule – founder of Sprott Wealth Management – told investors and other audience members that good projects would always find funding, but a more ambitious approach needed to be adopted.
“I think even in the so-called bad years over the last five years, really good projects finance themselves,” he added.
“I think that the issuer community is going to have to be less ethnocentric than they’ve been in the past. In the past, if you couldn’t get (a project) financed in Perth, you went to Sydney, then you went to London.
“Now you might now need to go to Shanghai or you need to go to Singapore, or you might need to go to Tokyo. It might be that the traditional sources of capital that you relied on no longer have any capital, which means that you have to source out other types of capital.”
Asked if there was enough capital around to fund mining, he commented “I absolutely believe there is”.