Alex Molyneux is the CEO of Galena Mining (ASX:G1A), a mining company that owns 86.16% of the Abra Base Metals Project (Abra) located in the Gascoyne Region of Western Australia. The Abra deposit was discovered in 1981 and remains one of the biggest undeveloped lead deposits in the World. Abra is within a granted mining lease. The Galena team has prior experience at bringing an exploration project through all stages of development and into production.

What’s your journey in becoming a CEO?
It was a little accidental. I was a specialist resources investment banker based in Hong Kong and enjoyed that. I enjoyed the physical aspect of my client’s business and understanding the practical difficulties they had. Mining is a risky and difficult business, then one day around 11 years ago, Robert Friedland asked me to join his Ivanhoe group of companies. I was immediately transplanted into a CEO role at one of his companies. Since then I’ve always been a public mining company CEO and board member.

Tell us a bit about your business and how you are commercializing?
I joined Galena Mining as CEO 1.5 years ago. The economics of its main project, the Abra Base Metals Project appealed to me as probably the best undeveloped base metals project in Australia in terms of investment returns. In terms of commercialising it, I’m leading a capable team who’ve completed permitting, engineering studies, lining up suppliers / contractors and even commenced the first phase of construction. At the same time, we’ve been sourcing the financing to complete the project to production. We did A$100M in equity deals in 2019, being A$90M as an investment from Toho Zinc of Japan for a 40% stake in the Abra Project, plus A$10M for a strategic stake in Galena from one of the largest family offices in Australia. Now we’re working to finalise a project financing loan to contribute the remaining financing.

How are you managing with the current COVID-19 pandemic on both business and personal front?
Personally, COVID-19 hasn’t affected me much. I’m spending the crisis in Taiwan where I have a home and which is probably one of the least affected places globally. In a work sense I’ve always been good on Zoom / WhatsApp etc. and miners are used to working in teams that are remote of each other with project sites separate to corporate offices and a lot of travel involved in the industry.

On a business front, the crisis has definitely slowed down our debt funding process. The banks are struggling a bit and also practical issues of getting financiers to site visits etc. have presented themselves. However, on the other hand we can see that the Abra project looks very robust at COVID-low commodity prices and that its reassuring. Plus, we’ve kept the company well-funded so we’re in good shape to ride things out.

What’s the most exciting thing about running your business?
Mining is a tough business as I said. Challenges present themselves everywhere. Technical risks, macro conditions etc. all affect how quickly or even if at all you can reach your goals… so it becomes a ‘no stone unturned’ business in both a literal and a figurative sense. It’s a business where if you give up on ‘roadblocks’, you won’t go far. You must run multiple ideas in parallel to account for contingencies and pursue every angle to its end course. That’s how you find the best technical solutions for problems but it’s also how find financing support when the market conditions are working against you… the excitement comes by succeeding against those odds.

How do you measure success?
Success is a varied thing really. I don’t really think about it. There’s no finish line, I guess. There’s one problem solved and another one around the corner. Maybe in that regard, persistence itself is success.

What do you think is the most important quality of being a CEO of a listed company?
I think honesty is most important.

What is your favourite book?
I can’t say I have a favourite… I’m reading When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson right now. It’s a history of hyperinflation in Weimar Germany.

What message do you want to send to our readership in Asia?
Your readers are investors. My message is that COVID has set off a fundamental change in markets they need to consider. In the last couple of decades central banks printed money to stave off crises and issues that threatened to cause deflation… it generally made leveraged trades cheaper and caused a few fun bubbles here and there. However, this time the rate of money printing has accelerated to a degree that we may reach the point where faith in money evaporates completely. Investors need to be exposed to the forgotten real asset classes, commodities being key. The global market cap of the entire mining industry is roughly the size of Apple Inc., maybe a just bit more. In a relative value sense, hard asset industry has slowly been decimated but I see that cycle changing now. Buy gold, buy base metals, buy miners, you will want to inflation protect some of your portfolio.

How can people connect with you?
Email:
Galena Mining Website: https://www.galenamining.com.au/