What does Digbee do?
Digbee provides bespoke and independent technical research on mining projects.
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 before the end of the year 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 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.
“We’ve also done reports for a specialist gold fund, and one of the private equity groups is going to use us for their smaller deals,” says Digbee founder Jamie Strauss.
“There are 320 new economic studies typically in the mining industry every year,” says Strauss, “but last year it collapsed to 200.”
That collapse has meant that any investment group that’s looking to invest in projects which have reached a certain level of economic modelling are faced with a quandary: either they accept that their investment universe is shrinking, or they take the initiative and try to bring projects along to a level in which they can be comfortable in deploying significant capital. One way to be confident that the risks of such a procedure are mitigated is to use on Digbee research to help with decision-making.
In itself this represents a significant shift in the mining investment world, and for Digbee to be at the forefront of the change represents a real opportunity.
“To me the culture’s already changing,” says Strauss.
“It’s a huge market.”
