What does Digbee do?
Digbee provides bespoke and independent technical research on mining projects, and will shortly be launching a new ESG product.
Digbee’s expert team of analysts run the numbers for themselves, free of any direct financial or economic pressures or inducement from the companies involved in the development of any given project, and produce a project risk profile based on a bespoke rating system.
At a certain point, effective due diligence will always require a site visit. But that’s by no means the case at every stage of the investment cycle.
Geologists can quite easily crunch the data provided by the drill core in models created on their own desktops. Processing techniques likewise can be assessed in an independent environment, as can engineering studies. None of this necessarily needs boots on the ground, but with due diligence requirements going up and cost pressures a constant, Digbee is beginning to build out a nice little niche into a major feature in the mining investment landscape.
What does it own?
The key entry point into the world of Digbee research is the website https://thedigbee.com/.
A new ESG reporting and scoring tool will be launched shortly to allow mining companies of all sizes to assess and disclose their environmental, social and governance metrics while ensuring best practice.
How’s it doing?
Demand for the research reports has been high, partly because the constantly changing regulatory landscape means that independent research is now extremely thin on the ground, and partly because Digbee’s roster of professionals and its network of connections is second to none.
The company has already completed several reports, with many more in the pipeline.
What’s perhaps more impressive than the demand-level itself is the calibre of the customer.
Global fund managers are using the product to help with due diligence.
On the ESG side, there is an aspiration that the work could change sentiment towards the whole mining sector. Certainly, the need is there, and Digbee's new bespoke scoring system should provide some standardisation in a fragmented space, and allow fund managers a consistent way of measuring ESG, a process that hitherto been nebulous and highly subjective.