My brief apprenticeship as an alchemist was a right royal cork-up. At the time, sticking a vial full of chardonnay into a SodaStream to make homemade bubbly seemed rather enterprising. It was, in fact, a commercial disaster and how no-one was injured in the violent blowback will always amaze me.
Forking out three months’ pocket money to replace the ruined soft-drink carbonator really took the magic out of the moment, especially since I had to wait an eternity to afford my own copy of Tom Waits’s Swordfishtrombones.
In that discordant vein, I do wish members of the brains trust at Marathon Fusion all the best in their glitteringly ambitious venture. This, verbatim, from Yahoo!news: “A San Francisco startup says it has pulled off the alchemist’s oldest dream: turning mercury into real, stable gold. Marathon Fusion says it did it in September with fusion neutrons, at 10 times the record set by CERN [the world’s largest particle physics laboratory] in 2025.
“Here’s the trick. Deuterium-tritium fusion fires out fast neutrons. When one slams into mercury-198, it knocks a neutron loose, leaving mercury-197. That’s unstable, and over a few days it decays into gold-197, the only stable form of gold.”
The news roughly coincided with a distinctly weak moment for the bullion price, which briefly slunk under $4,000. But I’m not sure that goldbugs need to start fretting about synthetic gold supplanting the Earth’s patiently forged nuggets in the way that synthetic diamonds have put a nasty flaw in the supply and demand equation for real diamonds.
From what I understand it takes an inordinate amount of time to fuse a minuscule sliver of gold, so scale is going to be a problem. That said, technology advances faster and faster … so perhaps this is a weird and wonderful story to watch.
It does remind me that back in the early 1990s, a rumour surfaced that it was possible to build a catalytic converter from copper. This was absolutely possible — on paper. The practical problem was that a copper-based catalytic converter would have been too large to fit snugly on a vehicle. This gave rise to a famous quip from a Business Day reporter: “Don’t buy copper shares. Buy Venter Trailer shares … because the copper catalytic converter would be so big you’d need a trailer to tow it behind the car.”
Older readers might have painful memories of another example of wonderful patents without practical use, Olpex. It was touted by JSE-listed Whetstone as being able to prevent evaporation in oil storage facilities. The problem was that the cost of harnessing the benefits of Olpex far outweighed the possible savings the oil majors might make at their storage depots. Whetstone, which famously tapped the Cape Town cricket community ahead of its listing, got unceremoniously skittled.
Turning to matters that I trust will prove more tangible, aluminium products specialist Hulamin finally has a new chair in the experienced and respected Themba Mkhwanazi. He has played various key leadership roles at resources giant Anglo American (including stints as CEO of Anglo Coal and of Kumba). Mkhwanazi has, significantly, also served on the boards of Anglo American Platinum (now Valterra), Anglo American South Africa, Anglo American Foundation, Mining 360 Dialogues and the Minerals Council of South Africa. He serves on the boards of Aspen Pharmacare and Grindrod.
Hulamin says Mkhwanazi’s global operational experience enables him to “contribute meaningfully to the board’s oversight of strategy and operational performance execution”. It does look like an inspired appointment, thankfully ending an uncomfortable impasse. Previous chair Paul Baloyi, who has recently stepped down from several listed company boards, had seemed a little reluctant to take the Hulamin board’s hints to step away.
The market loved the Mkhwanazi appointment, with Hulamin’s shares up by more than 20% in just a few days. Churlish as it seems, I have to ask if it might not have been better (notwithstanding Mkhwanazi’s undoubted pedigree) to bring an “outsider” into the fold? I say “outsider” because Hulamin is a former Anglo subsidiary and Anglo has been Mkhwanazi’s home base, as it were.
There are a few shareholders that believe Anglo’s conglomerate culture still lingers at Hulamin and has, in effect, hampered the swift execution of strategy to focus operations on the most profitable cores. Hulamin, as reflected in a previous column, did produce impressive interim numbers and can hopefully sustain its profit run into the second half and beyond. Mkhwanazi will need to make certain no-one drops the ball unexpectedly … as has happened, on so many occasions, in the past.
It’s worth noting that major Hulamin shareholder and metal sector doyen Volker Schütte, who has engaged robustly and critically with the board over the past few years, is happy with Mhkwanazi’s appointment: “An experienced hand is just what we need … the company can now get down to business.”
Operational consistency aside, there is also the big outstanding issue around Hulamin looking to get a well-heeled and strategically adept equity partner on board. Mkhwanazi no doubt has a vast network to tap in these critical endeavours. I think most Hulamin shareholders would want them to be concluded sooner rather than later, with the company at a critical juncture in ramping up its production.
