UK to sign critical minerals partnership with Saudi Arabia
Britain needs a secure, long-term supply of critical minerals, such as copper, lithium and nickel.
In his two decades at Bank of America Corp. as a mining banker, Omar Davis worked on several transactions with former Anglo American Plc boss Mark Cutifani. They’ve now teamed up again to set up a merchant bank hoping to capture the recovery in dealmaking.
The duo has joined with other bankers and commodity industry veterans to form London-based Odin Partnership Ltd. Davis said they saw an opportunity as the commodities industry draws interest from a wider range of stakeholders from governments to technology companies trying to navigate a resource-constrained world.
“We’re at a fascinating point in the mining industry right now. There’s just so much happening,” Davis said in an interview. “We’re seeing countries becoming increasingly protective of their resources, and everyone’s finally getting real about the challenges of energy transition and decarbonization.”
Odin’s team includes Anvita Arora, formerly co-head of Asia Pacific equity capital markets for Bank of America, and Keyvan Zolfaghari, an ex-Nomura Holdings Inc. banker who now runs Odin’s structured equity solutions business.
Abdul Afridi, a former Bank of America banker who most recently worked at Keen Venture Partners, leads Odin’s venture investments. It’s also brought on former Anglo American technical director Tony O’Neill.
“Our team consists of bankers who have worked on transactions in M&A and capital markets for years, but also people who have operated and run large assets, portfolios or businesses,” Cutifani said.
Odin was started last year against the backdrop of a wider revival of dealmaking in the global mining industry, after the biggest names spent most of the previous decade sitting on the sidelines.
Anglo American is breaking itself up after fending off a £34 billion ($42 billion) takeover approach from larger rival BHP Group. Glencore Plc made a run for Teck Resources Ltd. in 2023, which led to the Canadian miner’s sale of its coal unit. In October, Rio Tinto Group agreed to buy Arcadium Lithium Plc for $6.7 billion, stepping back into the M&A fray with its biggest deal in almost two decades.
The big mining players know they need to overhaul their portfolios for the future, so there’s “definitely appetite” for major deals, according to Davis. Private equity firms, pension managers and sovereign wealth funds are seeking to make bets in the space as well.
“The world, with its growing population, will only continue to get more resource-hungry in the next decades,” Davis said.
Davis was the global head of mining at Bank of America before retiring in 2023. After that, he had a brief stint helping restructure Indian metal tycoon Anil Agarwal’s Vedanta Resources Ltd. Cutifani, 66, was Anglo American’s chief executive officer for about nine years until April 2022, helping get the firm back on track after a commodity slump.
Other longtime bankers and industry executives have also gone out on their own, with mixed results. Ex-Xstrata Plc boss Mick Davis started mining private equity firm X2 Resources in 2013, but the effort sputtered after he failed to find deals and investors asked for their money back.
On the advisory side, London is home to boutiques like Robey Warshaw, founded by ex-Wall Street bankers Simon Robey, Simon Warshaw and Philip Apostolides. In the US, former Citigroup Inc. rainmaker Michael Klein started his own shop more than a decade ago that’s won a series of high-profile mandates from clients like Glencore Plc and Saudi Aramco.
While dealmakers are hopeful that Donald Trump’s reelection will usher in a new wave of transactions, the optimism hasn’t yet been tested. The volume of mergers and acquisitions globally rose 15% last year to $3.3 trillion, a figure that’s still well below the $5.3 trillion peak in 2021, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Odin has already taken on mandates from trading houses, Indian commodities conglomerates and private equity-backed businesses. It invested in IntelliSense.io, a provider of artificial intelligence software for metal producers, in addition to being its adviser.
For now, Odin is focused on energy, commodities and the energy transition. It plans to eventually apply the same model of mixing banking and corporate expertise to other sectors like health care and technology. Arora, one of Odin’s founding partners, said the firm aims to help its clients through the whole value chain from raising seed capital to managing life as a public company.
“We have both banking experience and the operational experience under one roof,” she said. “There aren’t many places that can do that.”
(By Dinesh Nair)
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