In the final morning keynote and panel discussion at the 2025 CIM CONNECT Convention and Expo on May 7, Ammar Al-Joundi, president and CEO of Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd., presented on financial strategies for a dynamic industry.

He opened the keynote by stating that financing is a core necessity in the mining industry, but one that does not receive enough attention and consideration.

“We focus so much, and rightfully so, on operational, technical, social aspects of our business,” he said. “But it is remarkable for an industry that is so capital intensive, an industry that has multi-decade investment horizons in an unpredictable and volatile price environment, that we don't spend more time discussing how we actually manage, much less optimize, our financing strategies, in what is a ferocious cyclical industry.”

He emphasized that mining companies must make flexible and dynamic plans in response to market volatility, as it is a constant in the business. Wise capital allocation takes discipline, he said, not only to do research before spending any money, but also the discipline to stay the course in an industry with a multi-decade horizon that is impacted by a myriad of issues, including geologic uncertainty, permitting uncertainty, labor force availability, technical and construction risks and more.

“There's a temptation, especially in the boom cycles, to pursue aggressive capital deployment,” he said. “High prices breed optimism in our business and sometimes overconfidence. But history reminds us that commodity highs are often followed by sharp corrections.”

He argued that smart investment management requires the willingness to say no to marginal products or expansions, while remaining agile and building flexibility and contingencies into operations. 

“The most successful mining companies over the next decade will not be the ones that simply survive turbulence, but those that build business models designed to thrive in turbulence,” he said.

He also stressed the importance of liquidity: “Forget what they taught you in business school. In a cyclical and volatile business, you should minimize leverage, minimize debt, and always, always have a lot of cash on hand, and more cash on hand than you need.”

He recommended that mining companies move away from treating net present value (NPV) as the most important metric when developing a project, as that can prompt companies to spend all the money up front, assuming everything in the project will go as planned. Looking at how much money a company gets back by using the internal rate of return is a metric better suited for volatile environments.   

Following the keynote was a panel discussion. Steven Bowles, managing director of Nebari, moderated the discussion with Nadine Miller, founder and CEO of Tinkerer Borg; Katherine Dewar, senior director at Canada Growth Fund Investment Management; Kendra Johnston, managing director of PearTree Securities Inc.; and Nicole Adshead-Bell, director at Cupel Advisory Corp.

The panelists touched on several key themes but returned repeatedly to the importance of thinking outside the box to attract investors.   

“What we really need to do is look at other non-traditional forms of investment,” Miller said. She suggested looking at equity crowdfunding platforms where Gen Z may be investing.

Johnston said that investors keen to take a stake in emerging technologies are a target audience currently underutilized by the industry. “There’s a lot of interest out there, but there's also a shift in the investors that are out there, and so we have to find a way to attract new investors that would traditionally be interested in artificial intelligence (AI) and innovation,” she said.

Adshead-Bell brought up KoBold Metals, a private junior mining company backed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos that has used the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to find battery metal deposits to position itself as a technology company. Earlier this year it raised US$537 million. 

“AI is very sexy at the moment,” she said. “You see money rushing in.”

She stated that there is a huge pool of capital for mining companies to draw from, but it is imperative that the industry take on its image problem, as opposed to trying not to draw too much attention to itself as an industry.  

 “Capital goes where it’s wanted and desired,” she said. “Our job now in the industry is to track just a tiny percentage of that. It’s an aging industry. We can't attract young people, we can't attract investors, to compete against other investment products. And so I think the question that we have to be asking ourselves, is how do we message ourselves better?”

She pointed out that mining companies often invest in the communities they operate in or bring economic benefits to the communities, that “we do a lot of things in the background” and it is time to be vocal about the positive effects that mining companies can bring to society.