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Peer-group benchmarking

Value chain consulting

Trusted benchmarking from a dedicated team of experts

SFA (Oxford)'s lithium, nickel and cobalt peer-group benchmarking is unrivalled, providing you with a detailed understanding of which assets are outperforming and those most at risk covering mines and projects globally. A holistic benchmarking approach takes into project execution of future metal supply-demand fundamentals, as well as scientifically constructed extrapolations of global primary supply profiles to 2040. Our definitive analysis investigates the reasons for outperformance or underperformance across the global peer group of producers.

Costing the mine-to-market value chain enabling like-for-like comparison

SFA can work with your economic and life-of-mine models to benchmark lithium, nickel, and cobalt mines and projects in numerous ways, highlighting strengths and weaknesses based on geological, technical, and financial merits. This provides a comprehensive understanding of how they compare to the current peer group and offers up-to-date analysis on selected global proven, probable, and possible projects.

The ranking and analysis of projects cover care and maintenance, permanently closed mines, greenfield, and brownfield projects. The evaluation considers NPV, cash flow, financial ability, technical, economic, and geopolitical constraints, downstream processing capacity availability, legislative requirements, and metal price forecasts. Brownfield projects are excluded from NPV derivations.

Independent contours of lithium, cobalt, nickel consumption, and end-use evolutions are analysed. Macro and regional economic factors such as exchange rates, GDP, inflation, consumer expenditure, reasoned metal price forecasts (regional basket prices and consensus by-product metal prices), powertrain evolution, and luxury market developments assist in extrapolating measured levels of start-up success.

Underlying base case demand extrapolations by end-use and a set of operating and financial metrics for each selected project can be provided. This enables you to influence market balances, price forecasts, project incentive pricing, and project start-up success rates for lithium, nickel, and cobalt.

Case studies

Let's discuss your benchmarking scenarios

Contact one of our team for more details.

Henk de Hoop

Chief Executive Officer

Beresford Clarke

Managing Director: Technical & Research

Jamie Underwood

Principal Consultant

Kimberly Berman

Energy Transition Technology and Metals Specialist

Daniel Croft

Commodity Analyst

Thomas Chandler

Principal Lithium Supply Analyst

Lakshya Gupta

Senior Market Analyst: Battery Materials and Technologies

Rj Coetzee

Senior Market Analyst: Battery Materials and Technologies

Adele Rouleau

ESG and Critical Minerals Lead

Dr Fahad Aljahdali

General Manager, KSA

David Mobbs

Head of Marketing

Joel Lacey

Sales and Marketing Specialist

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SFA (Oxford) provides bespoke, independent intelligence on the strategic metal markets, specifically tailored to your needs. To find out more about what we can offer you, please contact us.

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