The energy transition is often discussed as if it were a technology story. From where we sit, it is a supply chain story, and Africa is at the centre of it. Cobalt, copper, nickel, and manganese, the metals that make batteries and grids work, are concentrated in a handful of African jurisdictions. The question for investors is not whether African supply matters. It is where in the chain to position.
Primary supply: still the foundation
The DRC remains the heart of global cobalt supply, and the producers doing well are the ones treating cobalt hydroxide as a premium product rather than a by-product. We work with operators who have built their growth on exactly that: disciplined production, full regulatory compliance, and long-term relationships with refiners who care about provenance.
Zambia's story is broader than people realise. Beyond the copper headlines, licences across the Copperbelt and North-Western Province carry cobalt, nickel, and manganese alongside copper. Multi-commodity licences are quietly becoming some of the most interesting paper in the region, because a single exploration programme can de-risk exposure to three or four transition metals at once.
Secondary supply: the recycling opportunity
Here is the part of the battery story that gets far less attention. Every battery eventually becomes feedstock, and the infrastructure to process it is being built now, mostly in Europe and North America. We have spent recent months evaluating recycling platforms across the UK and US, spanning lead-acid and lithium battery processing, e-waste, and precious metals recovery.
What strikes us about these businesses is how different their risk profile is from mining. They have real estate, existing cash flows, and decades-long customer relationships, yet they trade at modest multiples because they sit in an unfashionable corner of the market. For an investor who wants transition-metals exposure without exploration risk, secondary supply deserves a serious look. The smart portfolios we see are starting to hold both: African primary production and Western recycling capacity, which are two ends of the same supply chain.
Where the value concentrates
Across both primary and secondary supply, the pattern is consistent. Value concentrates wherever material changes form: at the concentrator, the refinery, and the recycling plant. Raw ore and black mass are both cheap. Processed, certified, traceable product is not. Projects that include processing capacity in their plans, even modest capacity, consistently attract better offtake terms and better valuations.
The transition will be built from African metal, some of it mined and some of it recovered. We advise across both. If you are thinking about where battery metals fit in your portfolio, we would be glad to share what we are seeing.