Jonathan Moore, MD of one of the world’s biggest resource investment conferences, talks to Mineweb on how this this major event is still evolving.
The exodus of people from the mining financial and investment capitals of the cold northern hemisphere to Cape Town’s balmy summer climate is already under way, and will become something of a flood as the week continues. They will be heading to the Investing in African Mining Indaba and the satellite events springing up around Africa’s, and one of the world’s, biggest mining investment conferences. What changes are they likely to see this year following the event’s change of ultimate ownership to the London-based Euromoney empire.
Talking to Jonathan Moore, the Mining Indaba’s MD for the past five years (although ownership has changed the specific Indaba conference organisation group continues under his direction), we are already beginning to see changes as the event continues.
Maybe it has plateaued in numbers of attendees for the moment, but that is more a function of the big downturn in the global mining sector as much as anything conference-specific. And anyway Cape Town is perhaps hard pressed to accommodate many more people at this the peak of its tourist season.
Overall the conference organisers are expecting around 7,000 attendees – and with accompanying spouses, ‘very good friends’, and those attending satellite events, or just hanging around on the conference periphery to take advantage of possible networking opportunities without paying for conference attendance, there will probably be some 10,000 plus related people heading south and thus helping boost the Cape Town economy.
Moore comments that the conference has become so big and significant that in terms of changes it moves more like a battleship than a speedboat and some of the changes that are under way may not always be immediately apparent. But the event continues to evolve.
Moore notes that the new owner, the UK’s Euromoney, is a much larger and more information-driven organisation than the previous one which was perhaps more stock market driven with the Mining Indaba providing a far more significant part of its income.
For the rest of this column, click here: http://www.mineweb.com/regions/africa/will-years-mining-indaba-changing-better/