The editor of InvestorIntel keeps setting me higher hurdles to jump over. I am glad that she is not an athletics coach! This week’s task was to come up with not one Next Big Thing but six, and elaborate upon them so that readers could try and guess which might really be the Next Big Thing in both our opinion and that of InvestorIntel’s readership base of thinking investors.
The task was not as difficult in reality as it had seemed so here goes:
Build it and They Will Come – Production Leads Demand?
Specialty metals in new technologies have “form” in production leading demand. The best example of this is the 1960s and 1970s at the much maligned Mountain Pass where the upsurge in REE production led to the adoption of more REEs in applications and more research to put the excess production to good use. The rest is history. Some good examples of metals that may also produce this phenomenon are Scandium in solid fuel cell technology and lighting, Beryllium in sophisticated alloys and Antimony in hot metal battery usages. Scandium in particular has a particularly paltry current supply and accordingly demand is low. However if one believes that a big surge in supply can result in expansion of (known) applications in lighting, energy cells and aeronautics then the pertinent question is whether this is the Next Big Thing?
Base Metals as Technology Metals
Copper is of course the original “technology metal”. When the first electric charge ran down a copper (or aluminium) wire or the first telephone message was sent by Alexander Graham Bell it was well before most of the current crop of technology metals were even in common use. Just because a metal is in relatively large supply does not mean it cannot be considered as a technology metal or that “all its likely applications are known”. Aluminium due to its difficult processing requirements was a relatively high-value and low volume metal until the 1950s and most definitely was a technology metals. Nowadays it is the special alloying property that takes the merely mundane and lifts it to a higher plane. Good examples here are alloys of Aluminium and Scandium that should be seeing much more demand if only the Scandium was available in sufficient amounts to meet the challenge. Meanwhile Beryllium can be alloyed with both Copper and Aluminium to meet various high tech demands. Ironically Beryllium Copper alloys were used in more humdrum applications in the 1950s (like fishing rods) until driven out of use by price hikes.