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A recently announced move from European Union Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic has put back on the radar Australia’s critical mineral mines, both the property of publicly-listed companies or otherwise, as Europe prepares to invest in Australian critical minerals (critmin) companies in a United States-style move similar to what Washington did with MP Materials earlier this year.
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Part of an overhead EU Critical Minerals strategy (underpinned by the EU Critical Raw Materials Act), one which the Australian government somewhat-quietly nodded at in September year – Australia and the EU have inked an intergovernmental MoU on this front – it’s the same basic playbook that underpinned the Trump-Albanese meeting, which itself became a little mini-thematic.
The EU’s a big (collective) government; the last five years have made it realise it needs to establish its own domestic supply capacity for highly-crucial minerals; Australia has those minerals; that means money for publicly-listed companies on the ASX with those critical minerals.
Easy to understand stuff. But because the EU is the EU, the more tame and fish-eating cousin of the bodacious and burger-loving USA (especially under Trump), it’s perhaps not surprising the market hasn’t really responded with gusto.
We also don’t know which companies the EU are going to invest in yet, and the calculus here is a little different to the Trump-Albo meeting. Picks there were fairly obvious – many ASX-listed companies announced to market ambassador Kevin Rudd had approached them in advance.
(It was also fairly obvious that Gina Rinehart, a Mar-a-Lago party attendee, would likely benefit, despite the fact that Hancock Prospecting’s media team got quite miffed when I put that assertion in an earlier article. For clarity, I am not saying Gina did any lobbying. Just that Trump knows who she is, which is possibly the same thing. But that’s philosophical!)
Presumably, we could start to see such announcements trickling in in the days ahead; per Reuters over the weekend, the EU’s relevant trade body is close to announcing which companies it’ll be investing in. It’s unclear if, like Washington, the EU will focus on explorers or more established players like Lynas, a notable misser-outer of the Trump-Albanese meeting hype.
But the reality remains, this is probably one of the more exciting catalysts we’ll get before the end of the year.
On a vibes-based analysis, November has sucked for the average Australian share trading enjoyer. Following the October excitement of the Albanese-Trump critmins meeting, we’ve since had sour local economic data; sour US economic data, and fears of an AI bubble all compounding to make things difficult for those down under wanting to see an XJO figure over 9,000pts.
If anybody official from the EU is reading, I politely request you take us down ze autobahn, baby. Let’s see some green before 2026.
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