‘You need a lot to knock me course’

Jonathan Price learned the greatest lesson of his career in his first job, working in a nickel refinery near his hometown in Swansea.

A new graduate with an Oxford title in Metallurgy, its role was to change the way workers were doing a new type of nickel -based material. It became clear that the crew, some of which had worked in the refinery for a longer time than he had been alive, had little interest in being told what to do. Price put on the night shift and, on the balancing with the team, he learned that making a change is “more about people than anything else.”

“It was a lot of fun, but it was also a great learning experience,” Price recalls, now executive director of Teck Resources, a Canadian miner of $ 22 billion that is among the main world producers of copper and zinc. “I found the same thing 20 years later in Pilbara or in the Bowen basin. . . Having to convince a general manager of a mining operation that changing the way they worked would lead to an improvement. ”

A 25 -year -old veteran from the industry, Price has been directing to Teck based in Vancouver for the past two years, after joining as a financial director in 2020. As CEO, its first plans to remodel the company dividing it into two businesses, coal . and metals: they were dramatically derailled by a hostile acquisition approach of $ 23 billion of the Swiss miner Glencore in April 2023.

Price suddenly had to direct through one of the most aggressive fusion attempts and acrimonies in the mining industry in years. Insisting that it was not a beginning, he defended the company against Glencore’s offer.

The Teck -owned structure helped avoid unwanted advances: its supervotes are controlled by Norman Keevil, the former executive director of the company and son of its founder, who fiercely opposed the agreement. Finally, Teck sold his coal business to a consortium led by Glencore later that year for $ 9 billion, instead of taking the business to shareholders as originally planned.

Price recalls the defense against Glencore as a “challenging moment”, which involved nights in the office, leaving the timbre of the phone at all hours and talking to shareholders around the world.

One of the greatest setbacks was when Teck was forced to cancel a vote of the shareholders hours before he began because he did not have enough votes to support his proposal to divide the company into two.

The period was the “next level of intensity,” says Price, but also brought together his team. It seems surprisingly quiet when telling the experience. “The most intense periods you have are also the best learning experiences,” he explains. “You need a lot to knock on the course.”

Part of that resistance comes from the tragedy. The price was orphan, without brothers or close family, at age 17, when their two parents died from diseases of each other. “Almost any event in which you can think of in a commercial or professional context will paid in importance, compared to that,” he says. “It does not mean that it does not address events that arise with great intensity, seriousness and hard work, because, of course, I do it. But in terms of how I handle my stress, I think I can maintain a significant balance. “

Price also gives their parents credit for instilling the values ​​of hard work and respect, something that he realized after they died. “That was a rather formative event,” he says. “He changed who I am, certainly, but that has impacted the way I thought about my role, my leadership, the way I work during the rest of my career.”

He also stimulated the price to attend university: his father never obtained a university degree but a precious education. An early obsession with bicycles, and racing bicycle used in the 1992 Olympic Games by Chris Boardman, led him to study metals and metallurgy.

In Teck, the ninth largest copper producer in the world and the third largest zinc producer, an industrial metal, Price is now realizing a plan to use the income of the sale of coal to invest in its copper business. This includes expanding production at the Blanca Quebrada mine in northern Chile and developing new Greenfield mines in Mexico and Peru.

“I like the change process,” says Price. “That kind of change I enjoy, prosperous.”

Copper, which is used in everything, from electrical cables to grid infrastructure to data centers, is expected to be in great demand as the energy transition accumulates rhythm. This has promoted a strategic change in the mining industry, including the offer of 39 billion BHP pounds by Anglo American last year. Price spent 14 years in BHP before joining Teck, ultimately as its transformation director.

“Here are important winds of tail due to new copper demand, along with an environment in which there are not many copper projects that are in an advanced stage,” says Price. “Demand is running far ahead of the offer.”

Many analysts and bankers hope that Copper’s assets, highly appreciated by the rest of the industry, will continue to make the company an acquisition objective.

But if Tackk ever makes a deal, he can choose his partner. The rage in Canada on Glencore’s acquisition attempt was so great that the Government rewritten acquisition guidelines to avoid hostile agreements in the resource sector. Any future acquisition of Canadian mining companies will only be approved “in the most exceptional circumstances,” the government announced last year.

The price will not be obtained in any future agreement, but believes that the mining industry is going through a consolidation period. During the last rise of M&A in the mid -2000s, I was working on investment banking in ABN Amro. He says that this period feels similar, as “we are going to see more activity from a perspective of mergers and acquisitions.”

Memories of working in finance report their focus on work. He describes going from the nickel refinery to investment banking as “the greatest cultural shock of my life.” The refinery, he says, attached to a daily “focused and disciplined” schedule. “You arrive at 6:30 in the morning[then]Go and execute. At 4 pm or 5 pm, the whistle blows and the work of the day is over. ” In the bank, Price was often the only person in the office at 9 am, “he would spend most of the morning drinking coffee and preparing to go for lunch”, before working until 2 am to finish a launch cover . “I just thought for myself, this is crazy.”

The price is concerned about the impact that the Trump administration could have. The president of the United States has said that he will impose a 25 percent rate to all the assets that enter the United States from Canada and Mexico. “Commercial rates and barriers are not useful for basic products trade flows,” says Price.

The bankers hope that the nationalism of resources will make the large international mining agreements more difficult to overcome the line, since countries focus more and more to ensure their own access to scarce resources such as copper and cobalt necessary in The energy transition.

Teck operations extend through US and Canadian borders: Zinc mine in the Alaska red dog mine, refine the mineral in its foundry of trails in Canada, then sells final products, including zinc, lead and Germanio, An essential metal for defense, customers in customers in the United States already worldwide.

Together with free trade, Price hopes to see a allowed reform that can accelerate the rhythm at which countries can take advantage of their internal resources. “There is a risk to energy transition if we don’t extract more quickly. We need it to support the energy transition, ”he says. “And in the absence of that, we cannot deliver the energy transition to the rhythm that the world had to deliver.”